


Alias Aesis

by aeonandon



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997), Final Fantasy VII Remake (Video Game 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark Comedy, F/F, F/M, Female Anti-Hero, Feminist Themes, Fights, Found Family, Friendship, Gen, Hojo (Compilation of FFVII) Being An Asshole, Illustrations, M/M, Post-Final Fantasy VII Remake, Psychological Drama, Redemption, SOLDIER-style PTSD, Sephiroth's (Compilation of FFVII) Terrible Childhood, Shinra Company, Slow Burn, TW: references to sexual violence, TW: systemic oppression, Time Travel, Unreliable Narrator, War, Wutai War (Compilation of FFVII), part BBC talk drama, part action movie, tw: child abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:01:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 23
Words: 115,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25367281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeonandon/pseuds/aeonandon
Summary: Power could have never allowed him to truly overcome Jenova's domination. Determined to win back his mind, Sephiroth expels himself from the lifestream. He lands in a war-torn Gaia, fresh off the heels of a Wutian revolution.She's a rebel commander wanted by Shinra for high treason, a woman who never expected to recognize her history in the eyes of another.When she finds him unconscious in the Nibelheim mansion, Aesis discovers that her revolution has only begun.Taking a break because I’ve run out of stream. Need some time to really build joy in the process of writing again. Updates are coming!
Relationships: Genesis Rhapsodos/Sephiroth, Scarlet/Original Female Character, Sephiroth (Compilation of FFVII)/Original Female Character(s), Sephiroth/Vincent Valentine, Tifa Lockhart/Original Female Character(s), Zack Fair/Angeal Hewley/Genesis Rhapsodos/Sephiroth/Cloud Strife
Comments: 6
Kudos: 31





	1. Prologue, pt 1: She's Got Rage Issues

**Author's Note:**

> It's 2020, let a girl have her snacks.
> 
> The remake rekindled a twenty year itch to ~~get my OC in Sephiroth's pants~~ figure out how Sephiroth might be responsible for the things he did and still realistically find redemption. Set years after the remake in a dystopian Gaia, this is a character-driven slow burn with a lot of action, (attempted) dark humor and backstory woven in. 
> 
> I stan a gritty, disconnected, emotionally raw and traumatized Sephiroth who made every decision he made in the game, and whose mind really was colonized by Jenova's influence; his degree of culpability is intentionally left ambiguous. 
> 
> This is meant to explore themes of trauma in the FFVII canon, so it comes with the general warning that it could be triggering. I made it AU because I've already managed to botch Hojo's timeline (eh), but I will try to keep things as canon as possible.

White light seared Sephiroth’s eyelids. Fire stabbed at the back of his skull, his heart dropped into his chest with a nauseating jolt. Every muscle in his face pulled taught like the turning gears of a treacherously elaborate lock. His hand moved instinctively to his brow. He steeled.

_Hand._

Sephiroth’s eyes snapped open and closed again, words unable to keep pace with the swells of urgency that rose in him, unable to give shape to the intensity. A leather glove held his field of vision, in and out of focus, backlit to agonizing contrast. He wondered if a finger would move. It did.

_He moved his hand._

New waves of sensation rushed over him, halting feelings drudged together to form a coherent thought. Throbbing head, tingling hands, two, fingers, numb chest, warm viscera, nausea.

_Body. Viscera. Vulnerable._

Dread pierced his stomach with the force of an electric jolt, he forced his eyes open and squinted into excruciating white. Before he could think, he had twisted himself into a defensive posture, the best approximation of one he could manage. Crouched, he waited on a razor edge for what would come; his pupils adjusted. Confusion reared in the corner of his mind – Shouldn’t he feel certain of superior ability, near omnipotence, he wondered, certain that this moment preceded victory over anything that came to focus?

The shadow of something too treacherous to contemplate passed through him for an instant; he pushed it aside with ferocious focus, forgetting his confusion immediately. His eyes were adjusting.

_Had… he… what happened?_

A swirl of dark blues, greens, greys, still out of focus. A familiar, musty chemical smell came clear to him first, his stomach churned in response and a clutch of sadness pierced his heart. Sephiroth suppressed a cry, his throat catching, his breath lost. He gasped, saw a staircase in focus that he immediately recognized.

_Shinra. …What?_

Sephiroth was collapsed in the foyer of the Nibelheim mansion. It looked ruined, stairwell collapsing, broken beams. Sephiroth winced and climbed to his feet, pushed the shortest lengths of silver hair out of his face and reached to stabilize himself against a cracking wall. His hand hit a broken bookshelf and ached in protest; creased leather-bound volumes tumbled and landed at his feet.

A vicious, foreboding energy filled him, a dread, that unbearable confusion; a desperate feeling wracked him. Treacherous energy. _His body felt jarring,_ he thought, his consciousness ricocheting around something unthinkable. He sidestepped, scrambling, turned inward.

_Mother…_

Sephiroth waited for a woman’s silken voice, a mind within his own, to quell the storm.

_Mother._

Nothing. Sephiroth reeled: images, intrusive, penetrating his mind; the lifestream churned, a hand, blood on its fingertips, gripped Masamune’s blade, _Cloud_. _Mother._ Sephiroth lurched forward; there was nothing. He had only memories of Jenova’s reassurance, echoes in the hollow of unmet anticipations. Slowly, as madness churned and he collapsed again on the floor of the Nibelheim mansion, he realized he could recover a sense of Jenova’s presence only by tracing her absence, the contours of the space she’d occupied within him were now a deafening, absolute emptiness.

“Mother!”

He screamed, called for her, every iteration more desperate, more urgent than the last; there was no one there. His certainty of victory, certainty of purpose, felt unreachable; it was the death of hope, of possibility, of certainty, as if the ground was collapsing under his feet, he reached out, grasping. He remembered his confusion, lost only a moment before, as it swept him under in a riptide of terror, of rage; a cold shiver cracked his spine as he understood his total sense of vulnerability.

For the first time since he was last in Nibelheim, Sephiroth was completely alone.

* * *

“Fuck yes.”

Aesis flipped eggs, still sizzling in a bath of butter and salt, onto pools of melted cheese held cupped in the tender bubbles of fresh sourdough. Every waft of grease and yeast was poetry. Egg sandwiches. Hangover food. Rapture, punctuated with the odd and inevitable five-alarm crisis of thirst.

Tifa grabbed a glass of water and chugged.

“Thanks, Ae.”

Aesis nodded. In that moment, she wanted silence, wanted distance, the grounding of a stilled, internal absence that she turned to in the dawn of battle; she thought better of it. This was not a battle. She was uncomfortable, anxious, but it was a moment she wanted to show up for as a friend first, a soldier second.

She was shit at it.

“Eat up, Tif,” Her voice was braced. “How are you?”

Tifa shrugged. “Well, I drank like a fish last night, I feel nothing now. So… Probably fine? Raging denial?”

Aesis tried to smile.

“Yeah, this sucks.”

“Yeah.” Tifa paused for a moment, staring at her glass. Then, “I’m okay.” She’d regrouped, her voice came solid.

After a long silence, she continued.

“I knew when we overthrew Shinra … I knew this would be inevitable, that we’d have to go back. I just never really thought I’d do it... But last week, if the planet has really recovered, then… Then it’s time. I’m as ready as I can be, I just…” Her voice wavered. “I don’t want to feel it, Ae.”

“Yeah,” Aesis spoke in her throat. The week prior, readings had indicated Jenova, once bound in Sephiroth’s consciousness and positioned immortal on the frontiers of the lifestream, had abruptly disintegrated; the planet seemed to have accomplished in its own time what their resistance could not. It had healed, they thought, from the alien incursion on its soil. It was over. It was time. Aesis was impressed with Tifa’s courage; she shuddered to imagine how it would feel to excavate violated ruins of a childhood home.

“I can finish eating and take a first pass.”

Tifa frowned. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“You’re swooping in to save me and acting like you’re not affected by being here. You have just as much reason as I do to be a wreck right now.”

Aesis felt a stab of irritation. Guilt. _Damn._ “Yeah…” She exhaled. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. You’re volunteering to be the one who takes the hit _._ You usually do. But that’s my hit, Aesis. Take your own.”

“You’re right,” she exhaled on a dark laugh, “I don’t want to feel it, either, Tif. Fuck.” Tifa moved her hand closer to Aesis’ arm, a gesture of comfort, preserved in air without contact. Her thoughts veered toward her own anticipation. She remembered the blood on her fingers as she gripped the rough flannel of her father’s shirt; she remembered the pain in her chest. _I’m sick of this._

“I know. I have to face… What happened that night.” Tifa’s hand moved instinctively to the scar on her chest, words harder to find. “My dad. Cloud. The whole… The fire.”

“The experiments,” Aesis replied with her own list; hauntings formatted in bullet point. “The orphanage.” A darkness crept into her eyes as she said the word, a deep rage brushed with fear. Tifa looked at Aesis’ eyes; there were moments, guitly blips in time, when the serpentine slit of Aesis’ pupils sent a current of misplaced fear through Tifa’s stomach. It moved fast, fueled by the familiar flavor of her friend’s incredible rage, by those familiar eyes. Sometimes she needed a moment to remind her body that those eyes were not Sephiroth’s, that the rage within them, the violence they threatened were not the same. Watching her friend’s fear, Aesis knew it; instinctively, with a brush of sadness, she looked away. She remembered flashes of decrepit walls, needles, decaying bodies screaming in pain. The horrors built into Nibelheim’s history; her own history. She wanted to turn away; she closed her eyes. 

“I’m going to know more about that place than I ever wanted to,” She said finally. “I’m scared, Tif,”. Atavistic fear had staked a claim by her side her whole life; it still felt unnatural to acknowledge, dangerous to speak. It was anathema to a soldier. “I’m more fucking scared right now than I was when I fought that battalion.”

Tifa nodded. “So am I.”

Aesis smiled wistfully. “At least then I didn’t have to feel it on the fucking day,” she murmured, remembering. 

A gallows smile crossed Tifa’s face. “I’ll take the reactor,” She said finally. “I’ll do it.” Aesis nodded. The two friends took a moment to steady themselves against the courage of the other, they breathed. Aesis put her hand to her chest; her eyes flashed. They were hesitantly articulating the first steps of the road ahead, the energy was shifting, building to a precipice. It was almost time. “Then I’ll take the mansion,” she decided. “Face history head on.” Tifa nodded. “Head on,” she agreed. 

The smell of butter broke their focus.

Tifa winced. Her stomach was a brick. “I can’t eat anymore.”

Aesis made a face. “I’ll pack them.”

* * *

Aesis walked through the mansion’s front door, into the foyer. She abhorred how easy it was; coming back to that place shouldn’t have been as simple as opening a door. There should have been armed guards. Screeching alarms. Lethal danger. But this was not an infiltration, not a military mission; it was an excavation. It was archeology. When she entered the mansion there were only the echoes of a creaking door, a light draft passing through broken and boarded windows, the dance of late morning sun catching in the estate trees, reflecting in its stained glass panels. Aesis swallowed hard. It was almost peaceful, a churchlike scene smirking on a foundation of atrocity. She would have preferred honest lethality.

She scanned the space, taking reluctant inventory of her memories. She didn’t remember the foyer but immediately recognized the smell. Mustiness laced with traces of the mansion’s detergent. Industrial-grade and corrosive, strong enough the lift the stench of congealed bile, blood, and terror from blankets; corrosive enough to conceal the cost of business. Synthetic citrus. Aesis felt her entire body reflexively brace, the onset of a freeze; she twitched her finger twice to release herself from the paralysis, taking another step forward with a taunt core, a squared-off frame. She was ready to fight. Her heart was pounding in her chest. She was the only survivor of C-SOLDIER, a SOLDIER, first class, but that moment had reduced her to a child. _Fucking lemon-lime._

The foyer was a mess. Once proud walls were cracking, beams were folding inward. Inbuilt book shelves had snapped, spilling their contents onto the floor around her. The tall staircase to Hojo’s suite was collapsing, its beam splintered and warped, its steps untethered to their foundations, treacherously unbalanced. The ground was littered with plaster and leaves, coated in clumps of dust that cleaned up in a large circle at the foot of the staircase. _It looked like something had moved…_ Aesis felt a moment of alarm and bent down to get a closer look. Some of the rubble had been dragged a few inches, large smudges in the dust suggested some sort of flailing motion. Recent movement. Her hand shifted to the hilt of her katana. _An animal,_ she assumed. Nothing difficult to motivate out of her hair. Streaks in the dust marked a path to the hallway, but Aesis couldn’t make out tracks. She frowned. Hojo’s suite was her first stop, but that hallway was next.

 _Be careful,_ she told herself.

After a look of foreboding she couldn’t quite place, Aesis moved on.

The mirror in the suite caught her attention before anything else. Grand, fabulously framed in gold leaf filigree, it was a monument to Hojo’s vanity. It was chipped now, dirty and cracking apart. She stared herself down with sharp, hard eyes. Warrior’s eyes, eyes for whom violence was an afterthought. Her large grey-green eyes glowed with flashes of raw mako, her vertical pupils had constricted to slits, the deep angles of her face cut sharp porcelain in dancing sunlight. She was taken aback by the moral ugliness of it. Aesis paused, swallowed. She had pulled the length of her venetian blonde curls into a sleek low bun. The vitality and freedom her curls inspired in her felt stripped away, leaving something more stern, more cauterized in her reflection. She was dressed in black; black leather sculpted and draped her uniform, the combat boots that cut to her thighs, her gloves; leather fashioned around armored knuckles to resemble the wrapped hands of a boxer. Her katana: black leather wrapped around black stingray along the handle, a roaring gold tiger was sculpted into its hilt. She stroked the decorative metal tucked under the leather with her finger, feeling a lotus flower blossom. A gift from Tsukahara, her teacher and master swordsmith, named Saya-no-uchi, or Saya, at his behest. Her gaze rested on her steel-alloyed SOLDIER-issued armor, painted matte black with a gold patterned trim, designed with broad, sharp shoulders and accented at the chestplate with gold-bezeled materia she’d carried as long as she could remember. Despite her efforts to reclaim her armor, she could see the vestige of Shinra’s ruthlessness in her reflection; she shuddered. Aesis touched the materia on her chest. She was overdressed. 

Tifa had done something similar, she realized. Her friend had worn long black combat pants instead of her usual skirt, had swapped her characteristic tank top for a reinforced bulletproof vest that fully concealed her scar. They had both fought and won military operations with less protection. _What an armory it required to confront the past._

_Archeology._

Aesis began scanning Hojo’s suite, the entire second floor. Artifacts, journals, documentation, materia, hidden rooms… The explicit goal of the mission was to do a first pass at intel, inventory what was there and quantify what would be necessary for teams to come in and excavate the whole thing. The implicit goal was more personal, widely understood. No one questioned who would take Nibelheim. Tifa and Aesis.

She found Hojo’s journal and a key; she kept both. The key was a bio-interface embedded with Hojo’s DNA that she knew would be necessary to unlock the heavily reinforced doors to the basement rooms; underground additions to the mansion’s structure that were added after the Nibelheim massacre. The “Orphanage”. Aesis slipped the key in her pocket. A grimace at Hojo’s memory notwithstanding, she’d dressed up for the Orphanage.

To get there, Aesis remembered, she needed to walk through the hallway; the hair on her neck stood at attention as she walked into it. At first sweep, it was unremarkable, save a few large, recent smudges in the dust, a felled bookcase. Aesis bent down, foraging through the rubble. She couldn’t pinpoint anything alarming, but still felt an eerie, unsettled murmur in her gut. There were books strewn around the floor, large hunks of plaster. Aesis squinted as the light changed, reflecting something sat atop a book cover. A thin thread… Aesis plucked it up. It was a long, white thread of some kind, or maybe… _Was that hair?_ She frowned. It was almost two feet long, too long to come from any animal she knew. _What…?._ Aesis could feel her heart beating, feel the warmth of blood rushing into her limbs in preparation for… A fight. _It’s time to fight._ Her vision changed; she was no longer interested in the breadth of the home but scanned details and movement. With imperceptible speed, she drew Saya; trusting her body’s wisdom, Aesis moved silently and deliberately toward the back stairwell.

The tracks faded as she went. The dust and debris were gone; the back of the mansion held together better than the front. Aesis took the stairs two at a time, back to the wall, scanning carefully as sunlight faded into shadow. She lifted her free hand to light the darkness with fire, bracing to fight as she reclaimed her vision. The basement had changed several times since the Nibelheim massacre; the dungeon space that had once allowed Vincent Valentine repose now concealed the entrance of the Orphanage. There, at its door, someone had unveiled a sign that read _Shinra Home for Wayward and Abandoned Youth._ Underneath it lay a large heap of black leather. Aesis squinted. She saw silver hair and remembered the white strand she’d plucked from the floor of the hallway; she recognized the rise and fall of breathing, black SOLDIER-issue combat boats poking out from the length of what looked like a leather trench. A flash of white armor, scratched steel. The heap had not reacted to her presence; Whoever it was, they looked asleep. It was impossible; No one could be in that basement.

_What on Gaia?_

_Black leather, silver hair, whitearmorSOLDIERissueFUCK!_

Aesis’ hand shot up to her own mouth to stop herself from yelling. She bit down on the leather of her glove hard, swallowing an explosion of adrenaline. Her eyes, hard before, filled the space with a razor’s edge. Her grip on Saya tightened and she lunged forward with exquisite speed; these were moments, fueled by fear, that read like lightning but felt impossibly slow to her; she was almost suspended in time. She couldn’t feel her body but saw herself move, aiming for hair; Aesis seized it, found a neck, and used its length to wrap a blood choke. As feeling returned to her body, enough that she could sense his weight sink into her arms, as time returned to normal and she hit the ground hard, Aesis started to articulate what was happening.

_Sephiroth. No._

_Sephiroth._

_How? HOW?_

_Trap? TRAP._ She held him in the lock and remembered suddenly to breathe, her entire torso expanding violently as it seized the same oxygen she was taking from him. Sephiroth was motionless as her arm flexed, he gasped faintly for breath. Aesis squeezed harder. _She would wait until she knew he was unconscious_ , she decided. When a few more seconds passed and Sephiroth didn’t fight back, she started to believe it. This seemed too humiliating for what she knew of his taste, his vulnerability was too real. She let his body fall to the ground and watched the fallen general gasp in a shallow burst of air. Still alive. Still unconscious. He didn’t move; it didn’t make sense. They had meticulously monitored the mansion. No one had walked in or out in months. It was impossible to dig in through the basement; it was impenetrable. _It couldn’t be real. It had to be real. How could he be here? Not possible. What was happening? Was this someone else’s body? Was she hallucinating? What if he woke up?_ Aesis’ eyes flashed abruptly, and despite her situation she smiled. _Well,_ she thought. _At least it was a military operation now._ Aesis and reached for the key to the Orphanage.

She knew what to do.


	2. Prologue, pt. 2. Two Humans

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Get out of my way.” He moved to stand; Sephiroth growled as his weight shifted, pain shot through him and brought him back down; he glared up at her hatefully, registering the cage. “…you’re irrelevant.”
> 
> The thin skin of her ego bruised, she snapped, “I’m Aesis.”

The tombs were a dungeon; a hole where the more waywardly-inclined of Shinra’s wayward and abandoned youth were encouraged to fall in line. Aesis appreciated the alarm sirens screaming in her head finding as she descended the Orphanage depths to find them; between the waves of adrenaline and the enormous dead weight of a six foot five wall of muscle in her arms she had no room to feel anything. She surveyed the familiar landscape for a place that she knew could hold him. She rolled shut one of the barred doors, locking him in a small prison cell she knew, from experience, was impregnable. It was only after that door closed that she started to feel. Her hair felt suddenly, impossibly tight; she reached up, groping for her low bun and letting her long curls down. They were crushed, frizzy; she didn’t care. Shame was pushing in her chest.

_What the hell was she ashamed of?_

She looked up at the reinforced glass and metal separating her from Sephiroth and understood. It didn’t matter who he was; once, long ago, she’d been locked in that same room. Her friends had been locked in that room. Some had died there. She’d thought of the tombs and seen opportunity, not trauma, she’d slammed that door shut with the same ruthlessness that Shinra officials had once shown her. She’d suffocated him like she was solving a puzzle, moving chess pieces on a board, the cold pragmaticism Shinra taught when they moved her. She shuddered, remembered the sound of the door locking, remembering the times she’d opened her eyes to the sight of that door, expecting to be dead, remembering the hollow in her eight year-old stomach as she begged for empathy from the empty eyes of a Shinra guard _._ Now, on the other side of the door, staring at the rise and fall of Sephiroth’s chest, Aesis thought once again that Shinra’s brutality was still living in her. The option of a remarkably ill-timed moral reckoning in front of her, she checked her phone.

She checked her scans first, radio frequencies of every militant group she could think of; No one mentioned him. No one knew he was there… It wasn’t time yet for Tifa to miss her. _Tifa._ Aesis swallowed. _What if—_ She dialed her friends’ number, suddenly terrified that something had happened.

“Yuh.” Tifa answered; her voice was firm, unaffected.

Aesis gasped in relief, yanked the phone away from her face. She waited a moment to reply, squeezing her eyes shut in an effort to push the emotion out of her voice.

“You… You okay?”

_She couldn’t tell Tifa about Sephiroth. She didn’t even know if it really was Sephiroth._

It was a terrible idea, of course, not to call for backup, and Tifa would be furious. Aesis didn’t want her to panic or call the others, didn’t want the fall-out of hasty, hysterical action. Besides, Sephiroth was contained in those tombs; no one was powerful enough to force their way out of that cell. _At least no one human… No. No one._ There was time.

 _You’re volunteering to be the one who takes the hit._ She remembered Tifa’s words earlier that morning. She wasn’t volunteering. She was ensuring.

“I _mean_. I’m alive. Powering through. You?” Tifa’s voice had softened.

Aesis let out a burst of laughter. “Alive,” she replied. “Tif, things here have taken a bit of a left turn –“

“—A turn? Is everything okay?”

“It’s… not boring,” Aesis swallowed. “Let me get a handle on things. I’m going to be late.”

Sephiroth coughed.

“Very late.”

“You want to spend the night in that creepy-ass mansion?”

“Not even… at all, but it’s complicated. I’ll call when I know what’s going on.”

“Should I keep the security feeds up tonight?”

“Yeah, please. Just keep the mansion locked down.”

“Sure thing. Talk soon.”

Aesis spent the next hour rebooting the first tactical support Medbot she cound find dumped in a surgical suite. _Welcome to Shinra MedStream Tactical Support Solutions. Shinra network is offline. Please wait to be scanned._ The bot’s AI core finally came online, initiating its engagement protocols. A light passed over her retina. Aesis glared.

 _Retinal scan complete. Birth Name: Unspecified. Specimen: 01-C. Codename: Aesis. Rank: C-Soldier, first class. Status: Guilty of High Treason. Priority one. Alarm system is unavailable. Shinra network is offline._

“Accept.” Aesis whispered. Hearing her classifiers was enough to suspend time. 

_Welcome, Unspecified. You are wanted by Shinra for crimes of high treason. Please note that when Shinra network is online, Shinra Security will be alerted of your presence. State the nature of your medical emergency._

“Aesis.”

_Restate command._

“Call me Aesis.”

_Welcome, Aesis. State the nature of your medical emergency._

Inside the cell, the Medbot scanned Sephiroth’s body on her direction, offering results as it performed its tests. He was stable. _Identification complete: Subject birth name: Sephiroth Crescent. Specimen: 02-S. Codename: Sephiroth. Rank: Soldier, first class. Status: Killed in Action. Error. Alarm system is unavailable. Error. Status incongruent. Error._ “Disregard. Reassess status.” _Status: Alive. Subject Age: 5 days._

“ _What?_ Check again.”

_Subject Age: 5 days. Confidence: 99.9%_

She frowned. Five days ago, she remembered, they had received the first indication that Jenova was expelled from the lifestream. _Sephiroth must have been ejected from it as well_ , she realized. In corporeal form. Had he just… materialized in the mansion? That sounded ridiculous to her, but it could explain how he got in without tripping their security.

“Confirm functional age. CNS scan.”

_Preliminary neural network scans indicate estimated functional age of thirty-two. Confidence: 62.5%_

“Accept.” _What if…?_ “Scan for Jenova activity,” she spoke with a chilled tone. 

_Scan is negative. No cogent Jenova cells detected. Confidence: 99.9%._ “History.” _DNA scans indicate stable splicing of once-cogent Jenova DNA sequences dating five days. Error: Thirty-two years. Error: Five days._ _Error: Thirty-two years. Err-_ “I get it.” Aesis started to pace. “Classify subject species.” _Classification: Human._ “…What?” The Medbot carried on. _Neuroimaging scans complete,_ it announced. _Extreme neural network fragmentation detected. Integrated scans indicate that the likelihood of a Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome in this subject is 92.5%. Treatment is unclear._

Aesis stopped moving. “Is he human?” She needed to hear it again.

_Confirmed. Subject 02-S is human._

“Is he a psychopath?” Her voice was almost a whisper; the question hung in the air.

_Unclear. Extreme neural network fragmentation detected. Likelihood of a Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome is 92.5%. Treatment is unclear._

Aesis groaned. “Locate historical records.” Aesis’ eyes narrowed as the Medbot answered. Shinra still kept hard copies in the Orphanage libraries. She paused, leaning into a twinge of longing. It wasn’t the time, but she felt… _compelled_. “…Locate my records.”

_Historical records of subject 01-C found. Located in sub-basement 4 of Shinra mansion, classified Jenova Project C. Classification: Top Secret._

An idea was forming in her mind, steeped in flooding memories, half-baked and dangerous. The memories pressed in, invasive, important.

 _And I thought_ , Hojo’s voice in her head _, if I should arrange a face-to-face—_

_Time, he was thumbing a stop watch. An alarm went off. Training room 49._

_Sephiroth’s simulated face, silver hair matted with their blood and wet with sweat, was an inch from her own; one arm pinned, her legs wrapping tight around him, crushing pressure as her thighs gripped the firm points of his hips. His full weight drove into her; Aesis groaned as violence ripping through her whole body, she maneuvered him; in an instant, his elbow came forward, lethal, she twisted to deflect, he froze. Time. Aesis stood, shaking, gasping for air; she moved a bruised wrist, launching a splintered piece of wood through the air. Broken to a stake, it pierced a white coat on impact; pinned, Hojo looked up with the confusion of a man who’d never been fought in his life; an entitled, petulant sort of hatred flashed in his eyes, like a toddler about to throw his sippy cup at a rabid dog. She was shaking in rage, bloody, tears streaking her face; in an instant, she closed the distance between them. Her own voice came out of her from a place so ferociously, barely human that it left her terrified of herself._

_You sick son of a bitch! You sadistic piece of shit! Hojo’s expression erupted, his eyes lacked any capacity to understand her. How dare you? How DARE you?! You will never stop using us. You’ll never stop._

_I’m not accustomed to such physical violence, his contemptuous sneer._

_Her voice, white-hot and trembling._

_You will be._

She stood now, in the ruins of Shinra’s power. In the ruins of Hojo’s ownership.

Aesis focused her gaze on Medbot; her idea took shape. _They were never allowed any piece of themselves, never allowed ownership of their own history._

_Fuck that to death._

“Locate records of new subject, birth name: Lucrecia Crescent.”

_Records of subject 01-S found._

* * *

Sephiroth opened his eyes. He was fading in and out of consciousness, each return too disorienting to offer ground under his feet. In his field of vision, there were only abstractions; flashes of sickly colors, stabs of seering pain. He saw light, slowly, metal bars; through their frame he could make out of the gross, blurred features of a woman’s face. His throat hurt.

“Where… Mother? What..?”

Aesis watched him.

 _Subject Sephiroth has regained consciousness,_ Medbot announced.

“Yesthankyou.” Her voice pulled with more tension than a taunt bowstring. Her left hand gripped mindlessly for her katana, fingering the leather and pressing it tight to her fingers on reflex.

Sephiroth felt a sudden collapse in his chest, relief eased the sore grip on his throat. A chuckle escaped his throat with sore abandon; _Jenova. She was here. She was here._

“Mother… Where… Where am I?”

Aesis’ eyebrow lifted.

“Unequivocally not your mother.”

In the back of her mind, she realized that she’d waited her entire adult life to say those words to a man.

For a moment, Aesis was struck dumb by his beauty. His eyes, vertical pupils so much more unsettling in person for their resemblance to her own, were iridescent pools of green, speckled with a chilling pearl, heavy eyes cloaked by the shadow of his tensing brow. A deep grey hollow at the bridge of his nose traced along their feline corners, as if lifelong deprivation had etched his skin in shadow. Silver hair cut across his gaze, obscuring the smooth lines of his face. She noticed his right ear sticking through his hair, his angular chin, and thought briefly of a shy, awkward boy she’d known in the Orphanage; a sweet boy, too skinless for the life he was forced to live, the life that eventually killed him. Despite the strength, the power – _and something else –_ that radiated from Sephiroth’s frame, as he skated the border of consciousness, Aesis couldn’t shake the feeling that a piece of that little boy was staring up through his eyes.

She found her voice, tightened her hold on Saya’s leather. _He’s a killer, Aesis. Get a fucking grip._

Her features came closer to focus.

_Not your mother._

The moment brought back his heartbreak with acuity, chaffing against the ache in his chest like sandpaper on a raw wound. He sneered, noticing blonde. _Clou— No._ A curtain of caramels and reds, curls, waves. He looked through her.

“Get out of my way.” He moved to stand; Sephiroth growled as his weight shifted, pain shot through him and brought him back down; he glared up at her hatefully, registering the cage. “…you’re irrelevant.”

The thin skin of her ego bruised, she snapped, “I’m Aesis.”

“SOLDIER, first class” Sephiroth inferred from her armor as he examined her silhouette. His voice, though rasped and weakened, still dripped with a hatred that ran cold in Aesis’ veins. _That was_ _it,_ she thought. _The something else,_ the energy thickening the air around him. Hatred. _Contempt_. His stare bore disinterest, but her armor sent a current through him; its prestige, its broad shoulders, the elegant drape of leather that clung to her chest, the architecture around her waist. The sharp edges of an armored bustier, black steel edged with gold filigree, were visible through her chest plate; she was not as exposed as she appeared. Her armor pulled his attention longer than he wanted to give it; he wondered who the hell she thought she was.

“You should call me sir.”

“I really shouldn’t.”

Sephiroth curled his lip. “Traitor.”

“Mm, well.” She leaned forward. “Right back ‘atcha.”

Her response gave him cause to focus on her face; her features hit him like a punch. It was a gasp that choked, stifled in his throat: “Your eyes.” Her slit pupils constricted, calculating, the glowing emerald that framed them winked to him of mako. The teal characteristic of a SOLDIER was missing, he noticed, her eyes were grey. _–How? She was like him._ He saw her waterline glisten; a single millisecond that betrayed the edge of a solitary tear. She felt something she could not name, images of destroyed bodies and eyes petrified in terror tugged at her mind. _How long had it been since she’d stared at eyes like her own? How long, for him… Had he ever…_

_For fuck’s fucking sake, Aesis._

“Let me out.” His tone hardened in anticipation of her compliance.

_Did he think she was a remnant? A clone? Oh hell—_

Aesis snorted, insulted. “No.”

Sephiroth glared with searching intensity, with confusion; she felt invaded. Aesis could feel an atavistic rage stir in her depths; her eyes flashed with it. Sephiroth froze for a moment, unsure. _Good._

“Jenova Project C.” Aesis let the energy between them settle, waited until she felt power shift to her corner to speak.

“3C-SOLDIER?” He asked.

 _Ouch._ “No, Jenova Project C. C-SOLDIER. Cherubim, we read. Clone, maybe.”

“What was it?”

A well-rehearsed speech. “When they realized how strong you were, Shinra wanted to replicate your physiology in others. They tried to clone you many times, Project C was one attempt. They took runaways from the slums, kids no one would miss, and tried to create SOLDIERs with your genetic alterations, with your unique… abilities. In the end they brought us here. Our final stop.” She gestured to the room. “This is the Orphanage. Shinra’s ‘home for wayward and abandoned youth.’”

Sephiroth winced. “What happened here?”

His lips thinned. Sephiroth’s head was spinning, a reflexive contempt and disregard fighting for territory against his curiosity, against a halting clutch of baffled relief. _Her eyes._ “Tell me.” The nexus of his conflict and chaos were giving rise to a compulsion , a _need_ , to know. Her pupils tensed, her eyes narrowed, _like_ _his own_. _He needed to know._

“When they realized they couldn’t clone you… they became afraid of us. Some of us knew it was wrong, some of us… pushed back. I pushed back. They killed most of the dissenters, they—”

“—Why not you?”

“Be good or be good at it,” It was the truth, though she spoke it with an ugly smugness that took her off guard; he was under her skin, she was compensating. _Ugh._ Sephiroth’s eyes narrowed, skeptical. “He wanted to understand my power more than he wanted me dead, at least for a while. They tried to brainwash us; they thought they could sustain warriors with no sense of history, no authentic sense of self.” Sephiroth winced. Aesis paused and continued. “First, there were enhancements. They didn’t inject Jenova’s cells like they did with the others… They used bioengineered viral technology to splice Jenova’s DNA directly into ours. It interacted with the mako differently, it was… excruciating. Like being ripped apart, disintegrated from the inside out. They killed us, some in punishment, most in experiment, left others to degrade in the filth of these tombs. So many of us died. They took in fifty children.” She paused, swallowed. It never got easy to say. “Ten of us made it out of here.”

Sephiroth nodded. “Did they succeed?”

“What?”

“Do you have my physiology?”

Aesis stared at him with astonishment. _That was his takeaway? Flaming fucking narcissist—_ “I do not,” She snapped, the force of his judgement knocked her once again into her own preening rage. She crossed her arms across her breasts, felt cold steel and smirked through disgust. “Obviously.” Sephiroth’s eyes widened; he looked away. Aesis’ laugh hit on a scoff; _Was he shy?_ “The project was deemed a failure. They could never strip us, or you, of… our individuality. Our humanity. But yes, in the end, they got a unit of SOLDIER firsts who got the job done.”

“Human?” Sephiroth sneered. _Impossible._ “Do you have my strength? Stamina? Skill?” His disgust was choked, two parts contempt and one part... loneliness. Aesis glowered at him. She wrestled against his narcissism and her own, against the shame he had somehow completely disarmed; shame that would send her hurling into another performance of her own grandiosity. She listened; underneath his contempt she heard a cry for another like himself, and softened, marginally. _Another like herself._

 _Weren't they_ _just_ _peas in a fucked up pod._

Aesis shook the thought out of her head and decided to undersell herself.

“Something comparable, I think.”

_She knew._

Sephiroth scoffed but felt uncertain ground; the possibility was too important; he was too shaken, too compelled. “…Are you degrading?”

“No.”

“…Tell me more.” Underneath his stoic composure, with the force of a tide, Aesis heard another plea. It was hard to see, obscured in the barbed shadows of his loathing and arrogance, but the depths of his loneliness left her breathless.

“We matriculated into C-SOLDIER, an exclusive first class unit. It was Hojo’s design. We were encouraged to forget. Over and over, told it wasn’t real, told we misunderstood what was happening. Misunderstood, when it felt like our bones were ripped apart. Misunderstood, watching each other die, shaking and begging for our mothers.” She thought of him, only moments before, calling for Jenova. “Those of us that had them,” she added. “It was impossibly easy to believe...” Aesis felt a swell of heartbreak and looked to the side. She stilled herself. “They told us they were a family that wanted the best for us… They they saved us, loved us, created us. They forced us to kill for them, to compete with each other, winners got luxuries, comfort, food; losers were tortured, starved, “improved”. As long as we fought each other and won, as long as we believed them, they called us special.”

His voice broke. “And you resisted.”

The glow of his eyes softened the shadows of his face. _He was listening._ More unsettling, as his eyes narrowed, burning holes into her, he was _seeing._

“I tried. I couldn’t throw myself away completely. Most of the others… Shinra didn’t have to steal their memories; they sacrificed their own history, they sacrificed each other willingly, for the illusion of safety. For the ignorance. Their connections to anyone but Shinra dissolved, their memories were irrevocably altered, most were lost. When they lost their memories, they lost themselves. In the end, it was a death sentence.”

Sephiroth winced and looked away; he hovered in the vertigo of _déjà vu,_ trying to remember: he felt the beating pulse of Aesis’ experience course in his veins, but couldn’t remember why. _What happened..._ He tried to think back, and saw a flash: Cloud’s face. Cloud. _Cloud. Core._

“I held onto myself; I held onto a…”

“…A core?”

“Yes… a… a core.” She was taken aback. _That was it, exactly._ _“_ The others… Eventually, the lies broke them. Suicides. Murders. In the end... I did cross a line. I attacked Hojo. ” Aesis felt her pulse catch. “They ordered a mass execution of the unit in response. They burned us, shot us down like dogs. I escaped.” Aesis looked at him. “It’s been war since,” she finished. “Shinra disbanded three months ago. You’re sitting in the skeleton of a dying beast.”

_Had he winced?_

“Sephiroth, they lied to us in order to control us … Have you considered the possibility that you were lied to as well?”

Sephiroth scoffed. “That strategy backfired.”

Aesis nodded. “On Shinra, certainly. It didn’t backfire on Jenova.”

His eyes punched air with a rage that left her whole body braced to defend. “What?” He was growling; Aesis was surprised that his voice came out quiet, surprised at the immediacy of his rage. She wondered if, on some level, he knew.

“Shinra told us many things that Jenova told you. It was brainwashing.” There was a horrible pause, electric tension in the air. The Medbot whirred. “Your despair is palpable, Sephiroth,” She spoke carefully. “Your horror… Your rage. Your loneliness.” His jaw clenched, she saw his eyes glisten, wet, obstinate. _Tears?_ “If you still want your mother,” She continued, feeling wet heat gather in her own eyes, “Then read Lucrecia’s file.” She glanced at the documents she’d stacked next to him, drawing his attention to them for the first time. “I don’t know a better way to tell you.”

He read.

It felt familiar, somehow, almost _expected_. It didn’t matter. It revulsed him. At first, his reaction was scathing, enraged, roared protest turning to shaken, choked amalgams of words, held together without syntax, meanings vaguely implied. Over time, his words came with more cohesion. They became sentences again, dazed.

Slowly, she told him everything she knew.

She showed him the Project C records that outlined Shinra’s gaslighting. She could see his heart breaking in his chest, fury in his eyes; even reeling, twisting his head away in the contortions of agony, she saw him hold himself upright. She had never known anyone that stoic. As she watched, Aesis realized how much pain Sephiroth must have endured in his life; she saw encoded in his posture the silence with which he’d endured it. _She’d never been able to do that,_ she thought. _She had always raged._ Every page, Sephiroth saw that Hojo had signed off on the lie. _Evidenc_ e. Evidence in the C-SOLDIER files. Evidence in his own. The evidence in Lucrecia’s file, he could barely fathom. Lucrecia Crescent.

 _If someone got a… mitochondrial transplant,_ words were echoing around him as walls closed in, _they wouldn’t consider the donor their mother._ Her voice, reasoning. His mind collapsed, pulled back by a flash of green in her eyes; her eyes, like his. Someone, something, with eyes like his own, _lying. But she wasn’t. She couldn’t be. It didn’t make sense, it didn’t… It did. It felt so familiar._ He felt a hideous tension, a feeling that he was threatened, truth and untruths collapsing his mind, he felt threatened and unable to _will_ an attack. Was he succumbing to truth, or to lies? _Dear God, that felt familiar._

Without warning, something clicked; pressure released and he felt himself yield. After five days helpless to the devastation of Jenova’s loss, trapped in abandonment so absolute that it seemed to tear him apart at the atomic level, in this her absence made sense. _She wasn’t his mother. It made sense. It felt true. How…_ Sephiroth felt a glance of _peace_ in that notion, of hope; it was an extraordinary incentive to release. He grasped for it. “Huh,” was all he could manage. It was incredibly funny, he realized suddenly, chuckling. It wasn’t. That made it funnier. He laughed.

 _Psychiatric state risks decompensation,_ Medbot interjected. Its circular head rotated in Sephiroth’s direction. _Subject Sephiroth, please state the nature of your medical emergency._

Sephiroth laughed harder. Roared suddenly in rage, he lurched forward against the prison walls with his full, furious strength. Aesis felt her breath clutch as his fists slammed the cage; the glass held. Barely. He laughed again.

“Perfect… monster,” he gasped.

 _Incorrect,_ the Medbot replied. _Subject Sephiroth is classified as a human being._ Sephiroth went quiet for a moment. _What?_

“…Qualify.” Aesis interrupted softly. His moods were changing so unpredictably, she felt afraid.

_DNA scans indicate the presence of approximately .001% splice of alien species ‘Jenova’ DNA. This splice is determined irrelevant to subject classification. DNA scans indicate that Subject Sephiroth is human._

Sephiroth’s laugh became a sob, then silence as he leaned forward, head in his hands. He roared again, screamed. _Through tears_ , Aesis realized. He was crying.

As her own tears gathered, it was dawning on Aesis that soon, she would have to face morning. There had been no end to her plan, only the impulse to show Sephiroth his history, to right the wrong his incomplete search in the Mansion’s library had wrought a decade earlier _._ What had she hoped to accomplish? Could she risk letting him out of the cage? He seemed so human, so different from what she expected; could she bear to kill him? She whispered to the Medbot, almost rhetorically, “Scan me.”

_Subject Aesis is human._

“So you, SOLDIER, first class. Aesis,” Sephiroth was finally able to speak. “ _Human_. Hah. How did you… survive… knowing?”

“Are you asking about redemption?” Aesis hoped. “Is that what you want?”

Sephiroth swallowed, he tilted his head back to stare up her. _His eyes like her own._ He deflected, a subtle smirk flashed.

 _That wasn’t what he said_. She answered his question. “I survived because I… I fought back. I fought like hell.”

Sephiroth scoffed, a soft laugh. He looked away.

His memories were returning, pulling him under, into before _… into Genesis_.

“Dreams of the morrow hath the shattered soul,” He murmured finally, as if somewhere else entirely. “Wings stripped away... My soul, corrupted by vengeance… Endured torment… For the end of the journey.” Sephiroth chuckled.

Aesis’ eyes widened. She’d had little idea of what to expect; poetry was the last thing she imagined. His words seemed evidence of an enduring connection to the world, of a soul still alive, still tethered to human ground. A pang slapped her chest.

“Shattered, yes,” She observed softly. “Watching you is like touching the edge of a broken mirror.”

Her ringtone nearly launched her through the air. _Tifa._

Aesis was not articulate. Tifa couldn’t wait.

“Shinra militia coming your way, Ae! At least a hundred of them! Get the fuck out now!!”


	3. Prologue, pt. 3. Wayward and Abandoned Youth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sephiroth confronts the possibility of freedom.  
> Aesis must make a decision as she faces incoming militia.  
> And Tifa reacts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: There are threats of rape in this chapter, and graphic descriptions of violence. For me, themes of consent and real-word traumatic violence permeate the FFVII canon (and Sephiroth's character, yikes); I'm not interested in writing non-con relationships, but I do want to explore those themes.

Aesis made a decision immediately. “You want the end of the journey? You have that choice. Shinra militia are on their way. If I leave you here, you'll probably die.”

“One more suicide? Or one more murder?” Sephiroth chuckled.

“Plenty would call it justice.” _Like Tifa._

She felt so guilty.

“Are you really offering to let me leave?”

Sephiroth’s eyes hardened. Aesis felt a weight drop in her stomach; she wondered if she was finally losing her mind.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” She was running on a miasma of competing instincts. Over the years, it was an ability she’d honed, a conviction in _what felt right_ that she’d trained to lean on when she found herself adrift. But she wasn’t _always_ right, and the stakes had never been as high as they were now; her confidence, puffed up in response to his smug superiority only moments before, wavered. She looked at the glass between them, remembered it shake under the force of his rage. Shake, not break. She had already witnessed the immediate bounds of his power, she thought, _they were still somewhere in the vicinity of her own. She could fight him._

_Probably._

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll attack you?” He read her mind.

“Will you?” Aesis met his gaze head-on, her eyes burned holes into him. “…No.” Sephiroth replied softly. She gathered her thoughts: this was not the man she’d heard of, the serene killer who moved with a permanent smirk through unspeakable violence. His power surged with remarkable depth, yes, his danger was a sharp edge at the fore, but he was human, and to the point, Aesis believed him. He followed, “You’re not afraid?”

She was. “Sephiroth, I’m the only one between us who has a real understanding of what I’m capable of. You tell me. Am I afraid?”

He looked at her, and after a pause, he smiled.

“Can we escape?” He asked.

“No. They’ll infiltrate any moment. At least a hundred, armed. We have to fight our way out. You’re still hurt,” It wasn’t a question. Sephiroth scoffed. “I’ll lead.” His eyes flashed angrily. She was speaking a language that he had not heard in a very long time; her confidence insulted him, excited him. “Hmph. Then I hope you’re as good as you think you are.”

Aesis exhaled deliberately and unlocked his prison door. The screech as it clanked open blurred in the air with the echoes of a crash, a hail of gunshots upstairs; a deathly symphony heralded Shinra’s arrival _._ Sephiroth steadied himself on the prison wall as he stepped into the tombs. Aesis squeezed Saya, readying her hand. Her eyes steeled.

“You’re about to find out.”

* * *

Shinra militants flooded the first floor of the mansion and spilled down the back stairwell. Aesis didn’t feel the powder keg of tension that had welled up in her until she moved her katana to deflect the first round of gunfire. She felt raw energy swell underneath her skin and leaned in, relishing the vitality as her sword struck a wall of bullets. “A mutant! Monster!” Aesis heard one militant declare, lunging with stupid enthusiasm. She closed the distance and traded Saya for a straight elbow to his chin; the man’s head snapped back, his comrades stilled. Sephiroth was surprised; _t_ _hat wasn’t regulation._ Aesis grabbed the back of the man’s head, bringing his face perilously close to her own; without breaking eye contact she kneed him. His body cracked, he coughed, gasping to inhale. “Oh no, baby,” Her voice was venom, she sneered down at him; she let the militant see her full rage at being called a monster by the same company that had mutilated her. He whimpered. “I’m the woman no monster can kill.”

She pushed the rage down and looked out at the men surrounding her. “You can leave,” she shouted over them. “Put down your weapons and go, now. It is the only way you walk out of here alive.”

 _That wasn't regulation, either._ Jeers, scattered laughter; a shot fired: one of the militant’s comrades had aimed through his back in a failed effort to reach Aesis, and for an instant, she was stunned. _The depths of Shinra’s cruelty never ceased to amaze her._ “What do you know,” Aesis whispered as the light in the man’s eyes dimmed. “You were surrounded by monsters, after all.” She let his body fall away. 

Aesis put her sword through his killer and leapt into the bottlenecked fray, leaping over another and kicking him down the stairs, using the contact her foot made with the back of his head to launch herself in the air. Bodies erupted in chaos. She landed in the middle of the next wave, a group of about ten men, armed to the teeth. “Rape this mutant bitch!” She heard their leader yell; disembodied jeers from his comrades filled the air. The hot anger in Aesis’ eyes deadened to ice; she skewered the first militant who moved to execute his command, slicing, headbutting, twisting the bodies of incapacitated men to deflect their comrade’s blows. She brought them to the ground one, two, three at a time, shifting between bodies, blades, bullets; she landed a lethal elbow to the back of a militant’s neck, then launched, catching a head between her legs and flipping its owner into a wall. Her sword came down. Sephiroth smiled; he held back, watching, judging. She was powerful; she burst through the seams of professional refine with an animal’s violence, with an animal’s wildness. Sephiroth watched the leader’s eyes fill with terror, and felt his own face still, calm. Somehow, watching her soothed him. He held his left hand out in front of him. Masamune’s hilt materialized heavy in his palm.

She was more comfortable with the brutality of close range combat than SOLDIERs were trained to be; in some instances she seemed to prefer the hard impact of a punch. He saw the corners of her mouth lift in a vicious smile as she squared off with the group leader; she ducked on center to avoid his fist and landed a body shot; Sephiroth heard the crack of breaking ribs, saw flames erupt, she was burning him alive. The aspiring rapist hit the ground; as if stunned, confused, he gasped, “You’re really strong.” A bizarre sort of peace crossed his eyes that sent a staggering chill up Sephiroth’s spine; the breath was the militant’s last. Aesis roared and kicked the ground, her boot crushed the man’s skull. The attack, more vengeful than tactical, had allowed one of the others to move behind her; Sephiroth ran him through as the man aimed his gun. Aesis heard the weapon cock, turned to defend; her katana hit an instant after Sephiroth cut him down.

The militant slid off Masamune’s blade, leaving their swords crossed against the other’s edge. Aesis and Sephiroth faced each other. Each adjusted their grip; the pressure holding Saya and Masamune together was precariously even. Aesis swallowed. _Was he protecting her? Attacking her?_ “Neat trick.” Her voice was rough; he felt it deep in his stomach. “Mm.” Sephiroth’s eyes met hers, dancing with recognition. “Yes, it was.” His smile returned; he was _admiring_ her. She caught her breath; _in that moment, did she want to be admired?_

Aesis’ ear perked and she broke hold without another thought, plunging a sword into the next body; there was no reprieve, no room for doubt. “Take my six!” She called to him as they cleared the back stairwell. The first floor was packed with men; as soon as they pushed into it they were swarmed with bodies screaming; some in taunt, some in terror. Sephiroth spun around, cutting down the breadth of resistance in his way. _Christ, he was elegant; he was as incredible as she remembered._ His back pressed against hers. “They’ve taken the second floor,” he observed coldly. “Not for long,” Aesis’ right hand rose up and he saw the moonlight change behind panels of stained glass, her left hand steadied her katana to shield incoming fire. She saw Sephiroth cut through a hail of bullets. Bodies fell. “Brace yourself!” Aesis shouted. _Don’t blow the whole fucking building_ , she reminded herself, a split second too late _. Shit._ The sky darkened; the mansion windows erupted with white, pulsating light. There was a moment of silence, then a blinding red flash ripped through Hojo’s suite. Fire. Like hellfire; for a moment he wondered how that was possible. Glass shattered around them, Sephiroth lifted the leather of his coat to shield his face. Aesis ducked, watching humanoid shadows consumed in flames; the force of the attack tore a burning ring through the mansion wall. She heard screams, then silence. For a moment, the drumming of hard rain against broken glass, glistening in the haze of returning moonlight. A slow creak of splintering wood sounded above; she looked up. The chandelier was buckling; its base was cracking. “Oh, hell.” _She tried_.

“Ahead.” Sephiroth broke position, his gaze bore holes in the foyer. She followed his eyeline and felt her diaphragm clutch. A massive AssaultBot; an enormous, armored machine churning spidery appendages, blades, saws, and bullets, all bearing down on them. “I fucking hate mechs,” she muttered. It was in and of itself an army; it was armed enough to drive her crazy. “You want it?” She asked. “Yes,” She watched his smirk; he readied Masamune. Aesis nodded; _smiled,_ Sephiroth noticed _._ “I wanna fly.” The bot opened fire. Aesis leapt up; summersaulting forward until her foot struck the broad edge of Masamune’s blade. Sephiroth helped her launch onto the chandelier; she jarred, it was a subtle movement that betrayed exhilarating power. He turned toward the Bot as Aesis caught the chandelier’s chains; she spun and slammed the full force of his assist into her landing. The wood beneath her buckled, its weight lurched. Wood ripped apart, the chandelier fell; Aesis guided the landing into her target. The bot stumbled, a miasma of blades, bullets, splintering wood erupted; shouting, she braced her feet on the Bot’s head and attacked, saw an arm shoot in Sephiroth’s direction; Aesis was in the air before she could think, landing a dropkick to knock the arm off course, pushing it into a wooden beam as Masamune tore the whole mass apart. “Hm,” she heard Sephiroth’s smug chuckle and felt a rush of relief that seemed suddenly, completely natural. _Did she protect him? Unnecessarily?_ Aesis landed on her back and flipped onto her feet; she was back in the air. Sephiroth was off the ground, slicing through wooden debris in midair and amputating another of the Bot’s bladed arms; His single strikes were enough to lacerate its weaponry. An arm ripped through the air to her right. Aesis ducked, sprawled down into a wide lunge, her katana carved through cranial steel. Bullets, wood, Masamune overhead, she saw a glowing light and reached down; Aesis ripped out the Bot’s central AI processor and tucked it away. The bot screeched to a halt, crashing into the floor. They jumped.

Aesis stared ahead; a wall of men moved toward them, around them. Frustration roared; impatient, she lifted her palm into an explosion of fire. The muscle of Sephiroth’s back moved against hers; he had turned to guard her. _He was protecting her_. Aesis felt a shock and glanced behind her left shoulder as he cut down the last straggler from the stairwell. The air was settling; the mansion, she realized, was suddenly very still. She could hear her own breathing. _One hundred men and an AssaultBot,_ she thought. They had taken a small army. A lamp somewhere in the foyer, riddled with bullets and teetering off balance, fell and shattered on the floor. Aesis could feel the rise and fall of her breath against the shifting weight of Sephiroth’s back. He inhaled; she felt his ribcage expand against her shoulders. The acidic smell of death was in the air, thinly veiled under a patina of Shinra’s oppressive lemon-lime detergent. Then… Smoke. Burning wood. _Oh, fuck._ A patch of roof collapsed in flame; the ceiling overhead gave in. Sephiroth grabbed her in a barrier; flames and scorched wood collapsed around them, she felt the strength of his arms surround her. _He protected her._

He looked at her from a mile away, inscrutable. “You were telling the truth. You…” He didn’t know what to say. “You’re… not so bad.” Aesis swallowed; _what a surreal conversation_. “…You’re good.” She replied dumbly. Her words felt like a confession; halting, awkward, and steeped in meaning. They stared at each other, listened to the sound of the other’s breathing over the rage outside, the whirling flames and screaming wood. His arms pulled back, abruptly.

Aesis shivered and stepped back, moving into her own magic for protection. “Let’s go.”

They left the mansion. Sephiroth grabbed Aesis’ shoulder; his steps faltered as they walked into the drive. He sank to his knees in the yard, halfway to Aesis’ car. She kneeled, urging him to walk. The rain overrode her voice; it was a torrential downpour. Aesis heard a mechanical whirl behind them and jolted, reaching for her katana. An oblong shadow, cloaked in a veil of mist, was approaching them slowly. She could make out a mako-colored light pulsing at its center; Aesis pushed Sephiroth farther behind her and crouched, readying her sword. _You’re protecting him_ , she noticed, a transient thought as she braced for another fight.

The shadow whirled.

_State the nature of your medical emergency._

“Medbot!” The tactical support robot squeaked closer. Its visual processing centers adjusted to focus on her, streaks of rain traced it’s spheroid shell, lit by the glow of its AI core. The Medbot trilled. “You’re okay!”

_Yes. I am intact. Please state the nature of your medical emergency._

“He can’t stand up.”

_Scans indicate that Subject Sephiroth is experiencing severe fatigue; Inserting IV. Recommended additional treatment: Administer food._

“Wait. We need to get him to my car.”

_Confirmed._

_You’re going to keep protecting him._ A soft whisper; she shook it away.

Sephiroth wrapped his whole arm along Aesis’ shoulder and leaned. “Shit,” she huffed into his weight, leaning back to hoist him to standing. Medbot whirled and haltingly moved closer, twirling its cranial shell. Sephiroth shifted a bit of his weight onto Medbot’s metal frame, and the three slowly made their way forward.

“Alright,” He growled after a few minutes. “I’ll walk.”

Aesis nodded. “I’ll get my car.”

“Take the robot.”

Sephiroth turned to face the mansion. Smoke billowed from its second floor; fires in its infrastructure appeared quenched in the rain. Water drenched his hair and washed down his face, droplets caught in his eyelashes, fell through the air across his haunting, haunted eyes. The downpour quickened, engulfing his vision in mist. Salt dripped from his brow, burning him; Sephiroth lifted his face toward the sky.

Aesis watched. She remembered Shinra’s black box footage of Sephiroth in the Nibelheim massacre, remembered the unhinged sadism in his eyes as he stepped into a wall of flame, unfazed by treacherous heat; an entire city burning alive, incinerated in the crimes that canonized its hero in hatred. She watched a wall of rain descend on him now; Aesis felt it blend with her own tears. She was crying. Her heart was aching, maneuvering against sharpening waves of longing and grief. She thought of C-Soldier, of their madness, their horrific crimes, their desolation. Their souls had shattered without mercy; she’d watched them die, watch them destroy until they became like rabid animals cauterized by shame. She was helpless as their minds came apart, annihilated by the forgotten villains of their ablated, immutable histories; she’d faced the same; somehow, she’d survived. So many deaths. _So many._

She watched Sephiroth stand firm in the deluge and Aesis’ heart cracked open. _Someone else survived_ , she realized.

The words returned, firm this time; they ripped through her like thunder. _You’re going to keep protecting him._ Her eyes narrowed, her jaw steeled. _Protect him._

Eventually, they got to the car.

She gave him what was left of her breakfast sandwich, half-eaten and hastily tossed in the glove compartment. Sephiroth made a face, she told him he’d live. _Confirmed_ , Medbot contributed. Soon, he slipped back into unconsciousness.

Aesis drove, her body grew heavier as a call to Tifa closed on the horizon. Halfway through, she pulled her car to a stop on the N-3 shoulder. Twenty missed calls and a slew of panicked texts. _Shit._

“Aesis! Oh my God, are you okay?”

“Uh… Yeah. I – We’re okay.”

“Did you— Someone’s with you?”

“Hm.”

“Who?”

“…Tif, I can’t explain over the phone. You’re not going to be happy.”

“What?”

“When I get there … I am sorry to ask this like this, but I need you to promise me you won’t kill him.”

“What? Kill who, Aesis? What are you talking about?”

“Just promise me.”

“I… promise?”

“Thank you. I’ll be there soon.”

“What the fu—”

“—Bye.”

* * *

Tifa came running out of the house with a bat.

 _Fuck._ It took two minutes after Aesis hung up before the name _Sephiroth_ snapped in Tifa’s brain like the pin of a grenade.

She was yelling, crying. Sephiroth was out cold.

“Tifa!”

“What the fuck is he doing here?!”

The bat hovered; Aesis moved in a disoriented impulse to protect her car.

“Tifa, he’s asleep! He’s out!”

The impulse strengthened. Tifa lunged.

“Stop!” Aesis was out of the car, pushing her weight into Tifa’s fury. “Tifa! He’s out! Please don’t hit my car.”

“Fuck you! What is he…? Aesis, what is happening?” Tifa’s eyes bulged. She looked terrified. Aesis felt another, deeper cut of guilt. “God… That, that’s Sephiroth. _Sephiroth!_ What the fuck is he doing here?”

“I found him in the dungeon, he was unconscious.”

 _“_ You _found_ him? _Unconscious?_ Are you out of your mind? You left him alive?!” Tifa’s voice boiled hotter, more caustic with every question.

“I-I didn’t know if he _was_ Sephiroth. I didn’t know what was happening.” Aesis’ voice steadied, hardened. “It’s him, Tifa. It’s him. But Jenova’s gone. I think he must have materialized in the mansion when the life stream absorbed her. It’s like it just… Coughed him back up. ”

“Wha… What? Aesis, what happened?”

“He kept calling for her… He was severely dehydrated, malnourished. The MedBot described a Complex Trauma Syndrome, some PTSD thing.”

“C-PTSD.” Tifa quipped, her eyes burning. She spoke with the driest voice Aesis had ever heard. “C-PTSD. C-SOLDIER.” Tifa angrily noticed, “That’s a lot of C’s.”

Aesis snorted. “Yeah. When he woke up it wasn’t… He did remind me of C-SOLDIER.” She nodded cautiously. “But he wasn’t the way you described him. He _felt_ human. He _is_ human. He read his file, the complete one, he read Lucrecia’s file.” Tifa’s eyebrows arched. “Yeah. He was confused, heartbroken, enraged. He wasn’t a psychopath.”

“But… How?”

“I really think Jenova brainwashed him.”

Tifa scoffed. Aesis could tell that she was wrestling against her outrage, trying to think. “Then you missed the fucking point. Maybe she did, at first” Tifa snapped. “She functioned as a hive mind, and Shinra… well, they might as well have doused him in gasoline and tossed her a match. But they said in the end, his will became stronger than Jenova’s. They said it was him. He’s not the victim in this.”

Aesis groaned. “Maybe they thought it was him. But it doesn’t… Fuck. An adult’s psychic structure doesn’t just gut itself like that… It splits apart in the trauma, it fragments, fine, but you can’t go from being a complex, _caring_ adult to an undiluted psychopath overnight. You just can’t. Jenova was a master manipulator. I think she must have used the power of his trauma, his longing, his narcissism… but imposed her own structure on it. Shaped it with her will, her ambition.”

“Seven nights. And the _point_ is that he overpowered her. He’s fucking evil, Ae.”

“And _when_ he overpowered her, she’d already eroded the structure of his mind. His plan was still an extension of _her_ mind. Corrosion of the lifestream, omnipotence, annihilation… _her_ ambitions. He’d have controlled her only in the most superficial sense if he had so little of his own self preserved. That is literally the definition of brainwashing.”

“They said he was in control.”

“Oh for the love of… Fuck this conversation.” Aesis groaned and rubbed her forehead. “I _know._ I _know_ what the fuck they said. I know he wasn't the victim, but I still don’t see black or white here, Tifa. I just don’t. What do you think?”

Tifa scoffed. “I think Sephiroth believed he was in control. Hojo, obviously. Cloud believed it. But, Jenova, with all her power… Huh. I think men with abandonment issues usually need to think they’re in charge.”

Aesis smiled. “That they do.”

“Maybe we missed her influence. But he hurt me, Ae. He killed my best friend. He made a fucking choice.”

Aesis swallowed.

“I know Tif, so did I. I’m so sorry.”

“He killed my father. I hate him so much.”

“I killed his.”

“Please,” Tifa scoffed, briefly tempted to argue that Hojo didn’t count. She thought better of it as Aesis’ point settled, as she remembered Hojo’s twisted face, his absent, glazed eyes, his mouth frozen in a disjointed scream. Hojo was human, too, technically. Aesis had ripped him apart while Tifa stood by.

Tifa sighed. “Maybe by this point we’ve all lost a piece of our souls… Aerith said, if we won, we’d change who we are. That we had a choice. It didn’t feel like it...” Her jaw tensed as she willed herself toward empathy. “Even if you’re right, even if he’s.. whoever he was, this is too dangerous, Ae. He’s too dangerous.”

“I can’t kill him.”

“Why the hell not? You can kill a lot of people!”

“I can’t. I come from the same place. No one else made it out. No one else.” Aesis felt the threat of tears, it burned; _why the fuck_ , she thought, _am I crying so much?_

“Cloud did.”

“Cloud got a bath!” Her sadness veered to anger. Tifa glared. “I’m sorry – I’m sorry. I know. That’s not fair, but it is _not_ the _same_. I lost _all of them_ , Tifa.” She felt another bout of tears surge. “They brainwashed me, too. I know what it feels like. I know what it means to be destroyed like that. What happened to Sephiroth… it _feels_ the same to me. And he _isn’t destroyed yet._ If I kill him when he’s not… gone… I couldn’t live with myself.”

“You’re saying this after literally killing one hundred people.”

“Yeah, Tifa, that’s the fucking point.” Her voice was raw.

“I… I just… I don’t want to… Cloud isn’t here, Aesis. I want him to be here right now. I want this to be easy.”

“I know.”

“You’re not afraid of him?”

“…I’m not afraid of that.”

Tifa nodded slowly, getting her bearings. “You think _Sephiroth_ is your last… surviving comrade? And you won’t leave a man behind?” Tifa tried to swallow her tone, but her next words were still harsher than she intended. “That’s not all, is it? Even with friends that love you, Aesis, you’re one of the loneliest people I know. You’ll never admit it, but you are. Now you have someone who knows what it’s like to be you.”

Aesis steeled. _Tifa was right._

Tifa nodded, eyes pooling with sadness. She followed her own reasoning to its conclusion. “Then you can’t kill him... And you’re going to try to protect him. You’re going to try to help him.”

“Tif, I… I don’t think he’ll try to hurt us.”

Tifa laughed bitterly. “Uh huh. Sure, yeah, right,” She paused, her tone softer, more serious. “I need to know something. If I’d asked you to extend this kind of grace to Hojo, would you have listened?”

Aesis’ face was wracked with guilt. “You know I would have.”

Tifa nodded. She believed it.

“Then Sephiroth is lucky.” She started walking inside. Abruptly, she turned on her heel. Tifa raised her arms to gesture at their rental home. “Welcome to the new home for Shinra’s wayward and abandoned youth!”

Aesis’s laugh was almost a cry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I changed the "Canon-Compliant" tag to "Canon-Compliant-ish" for this chapter. You can see where I buck against the canon, but when I wrote this, all I'd remembered from DoC summaries was that Hojo survived. Oops. Maybe post-remake he survived again? As a non-f@%!ing computer program? Feedback is always welcome, and if you keep it kind, you get my gratitude. Thanks for reading!


	4. Prologue, pt. 4. Smudged Cutlery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sephiroth wakes up in an e-B'n'B and must reckon with new circumstances as he wades through the resurgence of old memories and old feelings.  
> Tifa and Aesis try to navigate the divide of his presence.  
> In an effort to get to know the other, Aesis and Sephiroth spar.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And the prologue ends! I've been mainlining Watchmen and I had the idea of making the next chapter like an episode (FFVII, the series?), so the format of the story will shift after this. 
> 
> It might take some time to get it up; I'd like to get some illustrations finished first. 
> 
> If you like this, or parts of it, if there are things you'd like more or less of, please let me know!

Music. Haunting rhythms; drums beating like a heart, he held for a moment with their piercing sound. The distortions of a bass guitar crescendoed; humming sounded off a solemn, resonant melody. He reflexively waited for Jenova’s voice, _her pull,_ to press into his consciousness. He felt the confusion of her absence before he remembered. Again. It had been a week of coming in and out of consciousness, a week in and out of forgetting.

A word in alto hit like gunfire: _Desperado_.

He jolted to remember when he’d closed his eyes, he’d fought alongside another. He’d believed Jenova was not his mother. He felt heavy. A muted anger stilled him, a wave of confusion was throbbing in his head. _Was it real? Was any of it true?_ It felt like his skull had been hollowed from the inside out, left inflamed, cavernous; the feeling of tugging on a pulled, atrophied muscle pulsed behind his eyes. He had believed it, he remembered, _accused_ himself with disgust, _but the evidence_. _No. No._ Sephiroth opened his eyes. He was in a small, dim room, he realized, a bedside table near his head, the soft glow of ambient light peaking in through a cracked door. _There had been evidence before._ On the table was a large folder, a file… _Jenova Project S – Unredacted_ , he read. _No, it’s not real._ A picture on top of it; photoaged ink painting the features of a woman so much like his own, hair so much like— _No. No._ The name _Lucrecia Crescent_ flashed through his mind, _invaded it_ , unwanted, craved. _No._ Sephiroth felt a cold chill clutch at chest and move through his stomach. He leaned forward, a sudden, incapacitating stab shot in his head. His hand reached for throbbing temples; bare skin brushed his face. He could barely articulate a thought.

Sephiroth pressed his fingertips together; a thought came: _his gloves were missing_. He jerked upright; across the room were pauldrons, his things, laid out on a chair. Beside them, clothing… He moaned, threatening, deep in his throat and shifted to his feet. He was sitting on a bed, the leather of his coat oppressive on his skin. A black cashmere sweater stroked his hands as he reached the chair, its texture a softness he’d long forgotten. _Remember._ Black sweatpants. The night was coming to him in pieces, the weight of unreality left him paralyzed to the fragments of memories; they rooted in the pulse behind his eyes. _Aesis,_ he remembered, saw her serpentine eyes flash, heard her sword sing as it cut the air. She must have left him clothes.

 _The Project C files, Lucrecia’ files._ Theirs he remembered; _Subject C-01, alias Aesis: outbursts of aggression –_ _DNA_ _remodeling procedure, underlined. Lucrecia Crescent,_ _outbursts of tears_ … _Legal authorization for transfer of parental rights to Shinra, Inc., see Appendix A… I, Lucrecia Cresent, do hereby wish to give up any parental rights I may have—_ his head screamed, _Subject C-02, deceased, Subject C-03 deceased…_. _C-01_ _… termination. Denied. Containment protocols initiated, subject C-01 response: mixed, underlined, marked concerns of ongoing hostility._ He’d jumped to the end: _Subject C-01 directive: Terminate, with extreme prejudice._ Her kill order.

He’d read his own files, it frightened him that he could remember almost nothing from them. _Her files. Aesis… Lucrecia._ _Jenova. Jenova._ Women’s names, names that seemed to pull him outside of himself; names that threatened to consume his self, his memories, utterly. Their information, he could remember. His own felt lost.

 _Music,_ he noticed again, turned toward the door as he slowly, mechanically, traded his coat for the cashmere. The sweater cocooned the bare skin of his chest; Sephiroth hugged it closer, his right hand crossed to his opposite shoulder, covering his heart. He saw the shadowed form of a woman in the adjacent room and sneered, his grip on his shoulder tightening; he squinted through the glow of the light, bracing against the ache in his head to watch her.

 _Desperado,_ the music repeated. _Man whose heart is hollow._ Sephiroth squinted; it was an absurd amount of time since he’d last heard music.

She stood in a home dojo. White walls alight with warmth from pierced copper lanterns and candlelight surrounded her, ornamentation with minimal effort. She knelt down without armor, poised with her katana; _such a beautiful weapon_ , he noticed idly. Her eyes opened in the firelight. Large, almond eyes, hard, cunning, powerful; her eyes were laced with grey and firelight. Her small mouth and large cheekbones seemed irreconcilable in their hard edges and soft associations. Sephiroth sneered.

_Mhm, take it easy. I’m not tryna go against ya._

She moved through a kata, he suddenly remembered Angeal’s lessons. _Spirit, sword, body._ Angeal had tried to teach him to embody ancient principles of self-development; Sephiroth recognized that training in Aesis immediately, albeit in a more cavalier interpretation. There was a discipline in her movement, _it evoked memories of_ _Angeal’s,_ something he had always teased, touting its irrelevance in the face of his superior ability even as he admired it. There was an ambivalence in her movement, a tension.

He watched muscle in her stomach firm to support the weight of her sword. She wore black obscured by a long curtain of copper, by thick, venetian blonde curls that lit like fire in the light. The details of her clothing, her hair, her movement, struck him with their divergence from Shinra regulations. She moved slowly through variations of one kata to the next with an abrupt pull and release of energy; Aesis extended her weapon into another posture. _A meditative exercise_ , he recognized it, softening into a bewildered frown. _How long had it been_ —

Shinra had required that sort of thing as part of a “wellness” curriculum for its SOLDIER recruits, part of a series of professional development seminars on stress management. He remembered the smell of lavender first, then the irony of leaving a mat touting the words “love and light” in order to be restrained and gagged with tongue depressants, for another round of injections, for another round of tests. _He would have preferred meditation with a sword._

Her hamstring flexed smoothly, pulling her out of the form. Her transitions were deadly in their power and aesthetic in their orchestration; releasing into the music, she was dancing, poetic violence, decisive, each muscle’s movement an overture to the next. The room smelled of hinoki cedar, hints of pepper and blood orange diffused in the air, the fog in his head was lifting. _This is real._

Finding Jenova, he’d believed that there was no other like him alive; _Jenova taught him that,_ he remembered. _She lied._ Sephiroth watched Aesis sheathe her katana and bow. _She lied._ He felt something terrible that made him smile slightly, his eyes searching. She turned; with her back to him she lifted off her bra. Sephiroth gripped in a resurgence of panic. He looked away for an instant, then back again; steeling, he watched as a tattoo tracing the length of Aesis’ upper back moved. The definition of her shoulder rotated under the tattoo’s design; Aesis was wrapping herself in a kimono. Black viscose, a shawl collar folded under its length in a subtle drape, a deep cut; he saw a silken lining sewn with its soft edge inward against her bare skin. She closed her eyes in apparent pleasure at its touch. Even in the details of her clothing, she was uncompromising, sensual. She seemed rooted in tradition and recalcitrant rebellion _,_ in vulgarity and refine. The jagged edges of her rage seemed thawed in soft warmth, she seemed... powerful without limit, warm without limit... that was insane. But in that moment it was soothing; his hatred abated, as it had once already. He could investigate no further.

Sephiroth fell back asleep.

* * *

  
“I called Vincent. He’s on his way.” Tifa stared at her friend. “You’re looking… Good.”

Aesis was leaning against the kitchen counter, sipping tea from a matte clay mug. Lemongrass spiced with ginger, laced with honey, she felt the texture of grey stone on her lips as she drank. The spice warmed her blood, she smiled softly. "Thanks, Tifa. That’s a good idea."

Tifa nodded; Aesis extended another cup, steaming, to her friend. “Tea.”

“Christ, thank you.”

“Did you tell him?”

“Yeah. Other than you,” Tifa sipped, closing her eyes for a moment. “He’s the only one who’s glad Sephiroth’s alive. He’s on board.”

Aesis pursed her lips. “I wouldn’t say I’m glad,” She replied. Tifa paused, considering; her voice was sharp.

“You’re something.”  
  
Aesis rerouted, harshly. “Vincent wants Lucrecia to be alive.”

“Well, he’ll settle for her son,” Tifa stared at her tea, letting the steam hit her face. “Be grateful, Ae. We’re all looking for redemption, aren’t we? So.” She paused, her cinnamon eyes still scrutinizing. “Yoga and tea, huh? I was gonna pass out on the couch with like seventeen guns and a pint of ice cream, but look at you.”

Aesis shook her head. “How was the reactor?”

Tifa frowned.

“Painful,” she replied. “Being back on the bridge was… I’ve spent so many years trying to leave that bridge, Ae, I don’t think I fully understood that I could. Not until I went back. The pain feels… Older, now. I don’t feel as weak as I did then… But I don’t feel innocent, either. I feel like I lost the way.”

Aesis clenched her jaw.

“I understood what you were saying before, that there’s only a fragile thing keeping you human in this. I was in so much pain, then… But it was simple. Sephiroth was hell on earth. I was good. I trusted that, and this time… I walked through that place and I didn’t know what the hell to think of myself.”

Aesis remembered her experience in the mansion, pausing in front of Hojo’s mirror, staring down a Shinra killer who, in the end, had been herself.

Tifa continued, “The first time I went to the reactor, I was so young. Hah. This time, Ae, I went in cold. The aggression… ”

“We’re all hell on earth,” Aesis contemplated. “Or capable of it, I think, under the right circumstances.”

“I’m not capable of that,” Tifa snapped. Aesis seemed too immersed in her own pain to really explore Tifa’s; Tifa felt more resentful than she anticipated. _She’d given so much that night._ “But then we’ve all done things we didn’t think we were capable of. Everyone except Aerith.”

Aesis frowned. “Then the only way to maintain that kind of innocence is to die. I’d rather fight. Shinra had the power, they forced us into a war on their merciless terms. We have to descend into that war, fight to win, and still somehow hold a higher standard. No one can survive and live up to that.”

“Not to die,” Tifa snapped. “To be murdered. It shouldn’t have been this way.”

Aesis swallowed; the anger coming from her friend took her off balance. _Had she forgotten—_ She recoiled in shame. “I can’t imagine what you must think of me for saving him.”

“No, it’s— I understand.”

Aesis watched Tifa’s face carefully. She didn’t believe her.

“That’s my higher standard.” Her apology rejected on uncertain ground, Aesis didn’t know what to do but try to explain. “I honestly don’t understand all of what happened in that mansion, but that's my line. I know what he’s guilty of, but he’s still one of my own. I will try to lift him up.”

“I said I understand. I just… What does it make me? How heartless—”

Aesis shook her head. “But you have the biggest heart of anyone I know. I think this evening is evidence of that. I mean… You could have at least totaled my car,” She smiled kindly. Tifa snorted. “You didn’t.”

“Yeah, well.” Tifa smiled. “We need your car.” Aesis smirked, her eyes gentle.

Tifa looked down. “Thanks,” she murmured, uncomfortable. “And you!” Aesis’ eyes widened. _Shit,_ she thought, _compliment return fire. Something was so off._ “Shinra raised you to be this… ruthless instrument of oppression, but you took that violence and built a revolution. You hold so firmly to what you think is right. That keeps you human. I don’t think it’s as fragile as you do.”

Aesis sighed and shook her head. “I wish I felt that uncompromised.”

“I wish I felt that compassionate.”

“Hm,” Aesis smiled softly. “Cheers. To broken people.”

“To broken people.”

They tapped mugs and sipped long.

“I did find something,” Tifa changed the subject. “At the reactor”. She pulled a USB out of her pocket and sat it on the counter beside them. “It’s definitely Shinra, but it’s encrypted. I haven’t cracked it yet.”

“I’m scanning the bot’s AI,” Aesis frowned, rolling the USB between her fingers. “That should at least tell us what they were doing in the mansion.”

“Do you think they were looking for you?”

Aesis shook her head. “No, I don’t think they had any idea who we were. Local recruits, my guess. Not prepared.” She sighed. “We’ll have to wait for the core to scan. I need to go to bed.”

“Yeah, it’s late.”

“It is very, very early.”

* * *

Aesis opened the kitchen door slowly. She’d asked Medbot to track Sephiroth’s movement through the house. It seemed the easiest way to get any sleep at all; even then, she‘d barely wrestled a few hours out of her anxious mind. Her mood, rolling out of bed in time to catch the first glow of sunlight, was not a gentle one. She felt terrible.

Medbot told her where he was. The kitchen was facing east; its wide windows caught the sunrise as it ascended the horizon. The room seemed an extension of the rolling hills that surrounded it, placed on the precipice of the phoenix sky. The kitchen illuminated with a pastel glow, soft pinks, delicate orange. _What a sharp contrast_ , she thought, to see that gentle light catch in the harsh lines of Sephiroth’s hair, see it pool in the hard folds of his leather pants. He stood with his back to her, facing the sunrise, wearing the sweater she’d left on his chair. It molded to the contours of his body, accentuating the breadth of his shoulders. Aesis swallowed. He stood in front of her coffeemaker. She saw a distorted smirk move across its reflective steel, lost quickly to the glare of intensifying sunlight. His hair shifted, moved in a silk cascade around his frame and caught the rising sun; he turned to face her.

“Aesis. You look… armed.” His expression was inscrutable. “Are we fighting?”

 _Gods, she needed coffee._ “Sephiroth.” Aesis smiled faintly, unsure. “If you want to fight… coffee first, yeah?” She offered a slight narrowing of her eyes in the direction of the coffeemaker to emphasize the point. _Were they fighting?_

She watched a smirk cross his lips, his eyes alight. Then something changed, unpredictable; something in the energy between them deadened.

“If I was going to kill you,” her skin crawled at the subtle aggression, the slap of his smug rephrasing, “I’d have done it already.” He wasn’t kidding, he realized too late; a tension overcame his mind, an aggression he couldn’t quite stave off. This was a different kind of smugness; this was the open door to something dangerous.

Aesis sneered, her head pulled back. Her gaze was a cold block; _shut that the fuck down_. She’d been there with him once, she was still tired from the gymnastics she’d needed to pull herself out of that quicksand. “You assume you could. This just changed so quickly, what happened?” Her question caught him off balance. Sephiroth’s brow tensed, she was scrutinizing him. “We were playfighting, I think” Aesis clarified, “and you moved into such… abrupt lethality. Why?” She walked to the coffeemaker; he stepped back, making space. “Did my mood threaten you?”

“I… Hm.” He smiled.

Aesis ran her fingers over the curve of a coffee mug. She saw him swallow. “That’s not—”

“—Now I might know what it feels like,” she interrupted. His gaze was hard. “That’s why I’m armed, Sephiroth,” Aesis realized. “I want to know you, I think. I do enjoy sparring. But you and I have both walked through hell, and I’m not here to learn to burn.” Sephiroth scoffed and stood, taken aback; Aesis wondered if going another round with that metaphor might be useful. “I’ve been there, yours may be one hell of a unique pyre but it gets redundant after a while. I can’t imagine a way to relate to you that would be more destructive, or more… boring.” “How…” he collected his thoughts, “then how do we… fight?” Aesis felt a smile return to her eyes, they challenged him. “You seem disarmingly intelligent; you might try words.” Aesis put the cup down. “Mm,” Sephiroth smirked. “Alright.” His eyes met her own, reciprocating the challenge. He smiled, felt the tension shift somewhere more enjoyable. “ _En garde._ ”

Aesis’ smile returned. “Coffee, first." Slowly, something playful infused the air as they talked. Eventually, his smirk became a small smile, a real smile, dampened but not extinguished by his darkness, and for a moment Aesis thought he looked incredibly young. She opened a cabinet door, her fingers lingered on its brushed metal, she was fighting her guilt at the developing ease in their rapport. It felt wrong. It felt natural. “Would you like some?”

Sephiroth nodded, watching her. Sunlight caught in her hair like soft fire. Her eyes cut through a brush of pink light that danced on her cheek with a tension he couldn’t quite read. She found she was smiling again; Aesis felt the weight of sadness loosen its grip on him.

“Do you often spar before breakfast?” He asked. Her hand brushed the viscose of her kimono top.

“I do.”

A cloud passed, greying the light in his hair; Tifa opened the kitchen door, the sound of its metal fixtures coming together seemed to transport the kitchen into another reality. Shadow overtook them. Tifa’s eyes widened, flashed hard and cold amber. Aesis watched her friend in the maneuverings of rage; her hand was shaking, her jawline firmed and tensed. Tifa ignored Sephiroth completely and looked at Aesis for several seconds. Aesis stayed silent, swallowing her guilt. “I…” Tifa began, each word halting in tension, “this is…. You know I’m... I want… And Vincent’s… But I can’t do this. I can’t fucking see this yet.” Tifa turned on her heel, slamming the kitchen door behind her.  
  
Aesis’ phone dinged with a text almost immediately. _I’m taking your car, I’ll be back,_ Tifa said. Then, a few moments later, _I love you though._

Then, _Don’t die._

_I love you too._

Aesis thought for a moment.

_Fill the tank._

Aesis had heard a stranglehold of tension in Sephiroth’s breath as he remembered Tifa. He turned away, hand steadying on the counter. Unsure of what to do, Aesis stared at the coffee in silence, a bold roast shipped from a café in Wutai, and waited for her own steeping rage, a self-righteous cover to her guilt, to soften. It took time. She filled their mugs, the spiced aroma of the steam pulled her down to the playful moments a few minutes prior. _Could they get back there? Should they?_

“I didn’t know you before, I never… saw it firsthand. Felt it firsthand. She’ll let you be here, Sephiroth, and I do think that in theory she’s more understanding than she appears. But you’ve taken so much from her. She won’t be friendly.”

“Are you… _friends_ … with Cloud?”

“…I guess so.”

Sephiroth’s eye were blank. “You must despise me.”

She handed him coffee, wondering what he was feeling. Her voice cracked, Sephiroth jolted to hear the sorrow and rage hot beneath her words as she confessed that she loathed what he had done. He saw disgust; he flinched. Apology, injured rage in his eyes, he was tracking her closely. Abruptly, his anger dissipated, his energy deadened and he looked down. _So sudden._ “For me to despise you,” Aesis continued softly, “I'd have to be someone different.”

She drank, the fog in her head was starting to lift. _Like talking to God._ She thought to a different time, in Wutai, enjoying the company of Ren, a veteran turned coffee roaster, over lattes and conspiracy theories. Ren had often speculated that Sephiroth was a son of Wutai, kidnapped and turned against his own people, forced to sin, beholden to Shinra’s cage. _That kind of power is Wutian,_ he’d argue. _There should be a home for any child of Wutai; no matter his crimes._ _You’re proof of that, Aesis_. Aesis would take an annoyed sip before replying, _flattery will get you nowhere._

“Were you really controlling Jenova?” She’d jumped off center and landed a hard cross, her thoughts settling on themes of omnipotence and captivity. Sephiroth, who hadn’t been privy to the tangents scaffolding her transition, was caught off guard. He gathered his response, held her serpentine eyes with his own. There was darkness in them, a warning jab.

“I don’t know. It’s so different now,” he broke eye contact, sneering at the kitchen backsplash, as if to emphasize the enduring importance of his hatred, or perhaps to protect Aesis from its impact. “It doesn’t mean the same thing. I don’t want the same things.” He faced her again, needed to pause before continuing. “The things I did… it’s as if they happened in a haze, I can… barely remember.” He caught his breath. “I was in the reactor. Genesis, my… another SOLDIER, he called me a ‘perfect monster’. I thought he must be right. that I am an abomination.” A shadow crossed Sephiroth’s eyes. “Then… it was as if my mind split apart, there was something pushing in; my rage, my hatred, my… longing,” he swallowed. “She was relief. She comforted me, she… galvanized my hatred. The idea of her, it brought me out of the world. She was everywhere. Everywhere I was. I fought… But it’s as though _I_ didn’t _exist_. My decisions required the sacrifice of my memory, my history, my _mind.._. She was everywhere. Everywhere. I was there, but I nothing; I made decisions, but they were… they feel so… outside of me, now.”

He wondered why he had stumbled through such an honest reply. Such a _psychotic_ reply.

“I apologize, that sounds insane.”

“No, it sounds… True.” Aesis swallowed hard. She was still angry with him, still angry with herself, and decided to land one more punch. “Then Cloud wasn’t the only puppet.” Sephiroth looked at her stunned, he glared; she held. He looked away. “Do you miss her?”

“Yes,” He whispered on an exhale, the word clandestine, escaping him. “The power,” he recovered, returning the hit. Aesis felt a chill. “I miss…” He trailed off. “But she used me, I think. Lied to me.” He winced, looked away. “She _betrayed_ me,” was all he said next; his words were growled.

“Genesis was your… friend?”

“I thought so.”

“He betrayed you too, I think.” Sephiroth felt a swell of hatred. “And you were vengeful, even then.”

A vision of her boot breaking the skull of the Shinra militant flashed in his mind. “You and I are both vengeful, Aesis,” Sephiroth murmured, defending. His recognition took her off guard; his hit landed, her thoughts settled on Hojo’s screams. “Yes.”

“Genesis was my… Very close to me, once,” Sephiroth continued. “I cared for him. But he betrayed me… His jealousy… It wasn’t enough to have the recognition, it was as if he wanted to destroy me for it. When I realized that… When I realized how badly he wanted to hurt me, to make me _burn_ …” He referenced her metaphor, “It split the world apart. Perhaps I’ve always sought companionship,” he realized, “and have become vengeful when that… desire… was exploited. With Genesis … with Cloud.” Silver hair took caught fire in the sunrise; he looked away.

“Cloud didn’t exploit you,” Aesis snapped. Sephiroth looked up, confused. _Hadn’t he?_ Cloud had _fought_ him, had won, but he begrudgingly recognized the false premise of that reasoning. He was suddenly caught in a wave of shame; his eyes fell on the shadow of kitchen knives lit up by warm sunlight, on a smudge of dirt that spoiled their otherwise clean steel. 

“Jenova wanted him,” He remembered suddenly. The knives glowed red; for a moment, he looked jealous. “So much of her energy, so much of _me,_ dedicated to him. To claim him. He… killed me. He was beating me… us… her,” Sephiroth’s voice darkened as he put it together.

“So she didn’t want a son, she wanted a victor.”

His lungs were empty, he had to breathe. “Yes, I… I think she did. I wondered if she wanted him more than me.” He looked hollow. “I knew that, on some level… I refused to let her consume me. I refused.” Aesis watched the determination flash in his narrowing eyes, his clenched jaw; his features had hardened to steel. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so much respect for another; _that was_ _so_ _fucked up. Was it?_ It was true.

“So much betrayal. _So much_ betrayal,” Aesis observed softly, “Cloud’s will was powerful enough to pull him off the ledge you fell from. Perhaps… Hm.” _But I don’t want to disappear,_ she remembered Cloud’s story of Sephiroth’s cryptic proclamation on the edge of the world _. I don’t want you to disappear._ Aesis wondered; she realized she enjoyed Sephiroth’s complexity, the exquisite challenge of his mind. It was taking the full breadth of her faculties to put the pieces together in her own. “Mm,” her thought formed. “Cloud was able to reclaim the man he was, he reconstructed his history, his memories. Perhaps …” She laughed. “Of course. Oh, fuck. That’s incredible.” Sephiroth glared. “What?” Aesis smiled sadly. “Perhaps you needed to do the same thing. No amount of power could truly undo Jenova’s control of your mind, Sephiroth. You’d need to reclaim who you were. You would need to reclaim your history, your memories, what you felt… The only way to reclaim your mind from Jenova would be to reclaim your humanity.” She felt a terrible admiration. “And you did it.”

 _Yes._ Sephiroth stood, shocked. _Gods, yes._ “Is that what I did?” he spoke low. She paused, admiring him. _He sent himself back_ , he realized. _He was fighting to overcome Jenova, and there was no other way to truly win. He had chosen this. He had chosen to reduce himself to a heap of skinless feeling, to reclaim his humanity, he had chosen… weakness. Pain. So much pain. Shame._

_He chosen his own mind._

_How could she read him so deeply, so quickly…_

He felt then how dangerous Aesis truly was, felt too disarmed, too seen. “But if he’d joined me,” Sephiroth parried, “Cloud would have been destroyed.”

Aesis' sad smiled returned. “Would you have wanted that too?”

He smiled. “That wouldn’t make sense.”

Aesis looked away, remembering an author she’d loved in her first years of SOLDIER, words she'd returned to, scrambling to hide in the worlds of others' imagination. “Logic,” she quoted, “inevitably, is the love of logic. It is not the love for human beings... I don’t think anyone is afforded the luxury of making sense, Sephiroth.”

“Hm,” Sephiroth murmured.

Aesis felt more guilt; she lowered her eyes. She felt a bit like she was tasting fine, forbidden wine; Sephiroth captivated her. “Cloud refused you…” she continued, “He didn’t exploit you, but maybe he did abandon you.”

 _Yes._ “Yes.”

Guilt, disgust surged; Aesis veered and said harshly, “He did it because you brutalized him. You tortured people he loved, you killed them. I would have done the same thing.” In that moment, Sephiroth had been disarmed; she landed another blow. He winced, felt reduced to a nebulous, hateful will; he’d been consumed, dispersed in rage, in hunger… in a sort of violence that felt more real to him in that moment than any other. _Even in power,_ he thought, _he’d been like vapor in Jenova’s air_.

“Did you feel guilty? Is that why you came back?”

“No,” he replied coldly, angry with her.“I came back to win." He saw her swallow. "But now…”

Sephiroth glared at Aesis, she felt the chill of it; she didn’t look away from the atrocity, didn’t collapse in sympathy that ignored its horror. He held back. “The things I did were monstrous,” he admitted.

“Yes. And you won.” Aesis said finally. “You’re here, somehow. She isn’t. You overpowered her. That’s… truly incredible.”

“Do you still feel like an abomination?” After a long pause, he heard her ask. It wasn’t an accusation, it wasn’t a punch. But it was redundant; _she needed to know._

 _Yes._ “No.” He snapped; his reply was a gut shot, his eyes opened, sharpened, narrowing through their silver veil. Aesis didn’t flinch. She looked contemplative, affected but unafraid. He wondered if she was afraid, if she was concealing it; he couldn’t tell. “Sometimes I do,” Her voice had the heat of tempered steel plunged hot in oil. He felt something open in his stomach. “I….” He did feel like an abomination. _Constantly._ “What do you feel about me?” He braced, ready to defend.

Aesis exhaled abruptly, took a thorough pause. “Uh… Hm. Many things. You seem so unprotected in this world, but for the protection you give yourself. Forced into power without love, forced into an ubiquity of brutality. I understand that.” Sephiroth felt a stab in his chest. He looked furious, but yielding. She felt her heart ache for him and tried to ignore it. “You don’t feel like a monster to me, Sephiroth.” She couldn’t ignore it, couldn’t hit him again. “There is something in you that feels… remorseful. Caring. Perhaps closer to the man you were before.”

“…Yes.”

“I would like that man.” She was taken aback, realizing the truth of her words even as she spoke them. Another abrupt change; Sephiroth looked away; angry, he was blinking back tears. Aesis took his reaction with an ache in her chest. “What do you feel?”

“I feel many things,” he snapped _._ For an instant, Aesis looked like she was about the flinch, but didn’t. Her question endured. He nodded to her, his eyes wet; Aesis felt her own tears. He didn't elaborate. His tone was a wall, she knew. She looked away; with exaggerated fascination, she smelled her coffee.

“It is better… than what I felt in that mansion.” He quieted, turning the angle of his jaw as he closed his eyes; his expression softened.

“A friend of mine is on his way,” She said after a few moments. “He knew Lucrecia very well… He wants to meet you.” She paused. “That was actually going to be his,” Aesis gestured at Sephiroth’s sweater, “But I’m told in no walk of life is Vincent Valentine a sweater man.”

“Will you stay with me?”

“Y… Wha—That… depends.”

“What do you mean?”

Aesis felt panic. She tried to get her feet on the ground as she rushed to describe the life she’d chosen, a life that was her own, a stark contrast to the life she’d led in Shinra; he heard the words “war” and “redemption” and felt himself pull away. Her passion reminded him of the poetic renderings of a love affair and his thoughts drifted to a line he’d read long ago, at Genesis’ behest, the last words of a dying doctor: _Only God knows how much I’ve loved you._ That line, and nothing else, had been seared in his memory; after reading it, he’d never been able to open the book again. “I don’t know your road, Sephiroth, but that’s mine,” she finished. “If that’s the sort of path you want…” Aesis thought of Tifa’s words, of her pain, of her loneliness. _Was she losing her mind? Did she want him to stay? Could she? “_ Walk with me.” _Fuck._

Sephiroth let her words settle. _War, and redemption. Yes_ , he leaned forward instinctively _._ “Yes,” Sephiroth affirmed, low in his throat. He took a step forward. Aesis could feel the heat of his broad chest, she was close enough to smell him, sharp musk over cashmere and leather. She looked up; his tensing, serpentine eyes seized hers with an intensity that could have pulled her to the outskirts of time. She could see a universe, the violence and beauty of exploding nebulae, alight in his eyes. Aesis swallowed. _Fuck._ He said, “Stay with me.”

“I…”

Part of her wanted to say _yes_ , for an instant, to give something irreplaceable, she recoiled, repulsed. It terrified her. _Tifa is right_ , came an internal reprimand. _He’s too dangerous._ Was he? Sephiroth looked confused.

“I can’t _stay_ , Sephiroth. I’m not a dog.”

He recoiled, turned with a hard pivot. “I apologize.”

“It’s not that… but….” _Shit. Shit, Aesis._ She noticed his shoulders tense. “That’s not how any of this can work.”

He turned back to face her. “Then how can it?” He looked taken aback; the wounds in his eyes seared with an urgency that cracked her reserve. Before she could think, Aesis took his hand in her own. Electricity surged in her stomach, she hadn’t expected the heat of his pale skin. With a moment’s hesitation, Sephiroth’s fingers overtook her own. He was holding on. _What is it that I can do?_ He asked aloud. The words seemed to echo outside of her. She could feel the latent strength in his hand, a contrast to the flickering fires and unsteady fatigue in his eyes. Reticence and longing tightened his grip, _he was so strong,_ his focus pulled to the pressure of her touch, heat against bare skin. “You still want to win? You’re a human being, Sephiroth.” her voice was hard, her throat tensed with restraint as she spoke. “You fought to be free; you are not being controlled anymore. _Find your own path._ ” He closed his eyes; she felt him pull her hand closer.

For an instant, she imagined that if she let him bring her hand to his chest, she would never get it back.

Her phone dinged. Aesis snatched her hand back; her fingers brushed his sternum as she stepped away. His eyes were still closed. Sephiroth felt her warmth linger on his palm as he pulled his hand into a fist; his exhale was a shuddered, grounding breath. He felt more stable, he noticed, without her.

She muttered, “Fuck me.”

Sephiroth’s eyes snapped open.

“He’s here.”

 _Tifa called him four hours ago,_ she thought. Vincent Valentine, at least eight hours away at the time, had rushed to a social call.

_Tifa never texted her back._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's some real-world art I tried to reference in a way that's not too jarring. Jury's out on how successful that was, but credit where it's due: The lyrics Aesis meditates to come from Desperado by Rihanna. The author she quotes while talking to Sephiroth is Osamu Dazai, and the book is The Setting Sun; the book Genesis recommended Sephiroth read quotes Love in the Time of Cholera.


	5. Nibelheim Files, Episode 1. Martial Court for Zoning Violations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The tension between Aesis and Tifa comes to a head as Shinra's plot begins to unfold.  
> Sephiroth, facing the impossibility of knowing another, decides to connect with the mind that frightens him most: his own.

_My new assistant. Hojo had called the man a prodigy. Sephiroth, he said. The same._

_A new man, cinnamon eyes and a sharp, beaked nose, smirking down at him. Sephiroth marveled that the red in his iris looked so cold; fire and ice, wrought sickly. A sort of disgust he could not tolerate lodged in his throat and stopped dead; Sephiroth was numb. A local anesthetic, another needle, sterile and bruising pressure on his arm as the new man rooted for a vein. Nims, was his name._

_So many check-ups, so few explanations._

_A corner of his purportedly prodigal face lifted, its fold deepening, that sadistic smile. Sephiroth could see the man’s pores, he could feel his skin crawl, pull instinctively away as the injection pierced him, sharp, hard; blood, he saw. Red, this time warm. This was the sort of thing, he knew, that should make him long for another. Others, he’d seen, appealed to their mother, a presence they seemed to feel wherever they were, one that never left them. But none of the others were like him. All he felt was pain._

_His hair clung to his forehead, locked in place by the congealed grip of sweat, cold sweat, the noxious residue of a mako tube. Nim’s eyes flashed, another syringe, a needle held out in front of his face, another cold shot, another stifled screams. Sephiroth learned quickly not to scream. Nims forgot anesthesia if he knew he could make Sephiroth scream._

_One day it didn’t matter. Mother. It came out of nowhere, a cry for no one. Nims, laughing. Hojo, of all people, was the one to stop him; that’s enough, Sephiroth heard Hojo’s nasal tones ring in his ears. He felt grateful, he felt sick._

_Hojo pulled him aside with a firm hand; he was leaving mess hall, awkwardly distant from the other SOLDIERs, silent among their older, boisterous ranks. Sephiroth held his head straight; his gaze seemed to cut through the wall. The florescent light burned the corners of his eyes; the light was too much. The sound was too much. Your mother is dead. Giving birth to you… So you’ve always been an adequate killer. Frozen. He froze; Hojo snapped at him,_

_But you’re still not good enough at being hurt._

_Sephiroth reeled; his voice was cut in pain; its color flattened under Hojo’s stare. Who… was she? He couldn’t sound like it mattered. He couldn’t sound like it didn’t._

_Her name was Jenova. Hojo didn’t pause. He didn’t even blink. Don’t ask me again._

_That night, dreaming. Sephiroth was pinned through the chest; he was bleeding on the floor of training deck 35. He cried, pain exploded in his lung like a high beam against his eyes; God, the light was too much. He saw a hand; stiffened reflexively, he was searching for posture in a body rebelling against him; Sephiroth felt a touch, gentle, against his forehead, brushed over his eyes; Against his chest. It was a soft voice; my son, he heard. A woman smiled down at him through endless lengths of silver hair; intuitively he knew her power would transform the jagged world around him. Her smile was warm, soft, everything warm, everything soft. My son. You’re safe now._

_Sephiroth’s face contorted in relief, in a mess of pain and peace, a paradox whose meaning shattered in his mind like glass under artillery fire. A sleeping hand crossed his chest. On his bedside, in a notebook he’d stolen from the supply closet, he’d written her name. Jenova._

_Two week later, Nims was appointed director of Shinra’s enhanced interrogation operations, and fifteen troops, SOLDIER second class, were sent to ground in Wutai._

_Sephiroth was with them._

* * *

He knew he’d regret it.

The heavy bag, all leather and canvas and sand, hit concrete like a pillow launched from a canon. A knuckle screamed, he ignored it, staring up at the broken, warped mounts that had anchored the bag to the ceiling. _They’d have to pay for that._

Sephiroth stiffened.

As fast as it had come on, his rage fled; like a flash of lightning in an otherwise clear sky. It seemed pointless to wonder why he was angry: everything. Every reason. He had better odds of achieving specificity if he asked what _didn’t_ make him angry. He’d drown in rage and in an instant, have his feet back on dry ground. It left him with a permanent, gnawing feeling that he didn’t know where he was.

That made him furious.

He glimpsed his face in a mirror; he looked calm, serene, save a tinge of menace that glanced the corner of his eyes. He was sick of feeling hurricanes and seeing only scattered rain in the periphery of his expression; he felt like a goddamn machine. His reflection left him reeling, his own expression made his rage seem as unreal as the lies that inspired it. It all felt unreal.

That made him furious.

He wanted to watch buildings come apart, storms explode in fury; he wanted to watch tidal waves demolish coastal towns and watch flames rip apart the night sky. _He wanted to feel real, feel powerful,_ he felt terribly like the ghost of a child, helplessly untethered to space and time; another flash, some hideous cocktail of emotion, and it _was_ real. That didn’t make it better. Screams filled his mind, visions of fire, of pleading bodies and quivering flesh surrendering to death, to a sword, blood, blood everywhere, needles. Clarity, horror, shame; he still felt ten feet off the ground.

Fury was the only damn thing that brought relief.

Sephiroth threw the bag in the air and hit it down with an elbow; he punched, again and again, until something cracked in his chest, cracked in horror at what he was. Pain, like a cool river; he started to cry.

Where once he’d grasped for Jenova’s presence, in fantasy, in futility, echoes of Vincent’s voice filled his head: _The hurt ends,_ he’d said. _Faster than you’d think. Perhaps faster than it should._

Sephiroth cried.

* * *

Aesis ran; she felt like she was going crazy. She winced as another image, intrusive, filled her head.

_A five year-old girl, running._

_Wisps of blonde hair pulled up on her head haphazardly, her face, smudged with dirt and blood, streaked with tears and sweat._

_Behind her, around her, screams. Fire. Where…?_

She didn’t know where she was. Buildings. _Wutai?_

_She ran._

She ran. 

Aesis could feel the heat of asphalt under her shoes, the force of each strike pushing through her abdomen, propelling her forward. Her legs weren’t too heavy yet; she checked her watch. Fifteen miles, an out-and-back down the N-3 along the dead rockscapes that surrounded Nibelheim. The Nibel region’s wild foliage had long ago dried up in service to the mako reactor, what was left was almost a desert. A desert, and the life that could survive that spartan wasteland… best to avoid. She was thirteen miles in, sticking to the roads.

When she ran, the world grew quiet, muted by the rhythms of her body; it was a meditation.

After every conversation with Sephiroth, she wanted to run. She didn’t understand the agitation he provoked in her, but she felt compelled to _move_. Watching his memories return brought her back to the most painful times of her own life. She wanted to talk to Tifa, but didn’t know how to traverse to growing distance between them. She wanted to connect with him, but so often when they spoke she felt like he didn’t see her; he would look at her with eyes shot outside of time, hold her in a fix of admiration or suspicion that made her feel miles away from who she was. When he did see her, conversation that could drown oceans developed between them, effortlessly, she wanted to swim those depths. But he was too wounded. He didn’t know how to be known, didn’t know how to know another; his intensity would consume and then, unpredictably, he would pull away. He would position himself near her and withdraw. Vincent, he spoke to more consistently.

Not that she was an endless supply of emotional stability.

She was so glad Vincent was there.

Her mind felt more precarious, more untethered than it had in years. She couldn’t always place the images and sounds passing through, the heightened daydreams; now, she didn’t recognize this little girl, but whoever she was, Aesis couldn’t seem to outrun her.

_This is not a game, don’t get in my way._

Music, prowling to furious drums, the twang of an electric harp. Her hair bounced, hot in the sweat on her neck. The rhythm of her feet timed to the song’s beat as her mind drifted, seized again.

_The little girl._

_Hair, matted against the side of her head, crusted with blood, dirt. She’d stopped crying, her eyes rubbed red, her sweat ran cold, thick against her skin. She was still running, stout, pudgy legs unstable in their joints, her knees dipping inward. Oh, it hurt. Until it didn’t._

Aesis saw weak, caving knees, the soft flesh of small legs, and turned up the volume.

_If you wanna push, I’ma shove,_

_If you wanna spar we can do it no gloves_

_And if you’re gonna run at me you better do it hard_

_‘Cause I fear no fall, no brawl, no scars._

Defined muscle held firm around her knees and tensed as she struck the road, the force of each stride stabilized in the orchestration of her kinetic chain. She was running too fast for the distance, _oh well._ After thirteen miles, it would hurt until it didn’t.

_A small hand, a little girl’s hand, fumbling at a glowing white orb; cold, viscous liquid gripped her fingers as she squatted, clutching for materia in a puddle of blood._

Aesis’ foot struck the center of a pothole dead-on. She ran harder, and finally, she pushed the little girl from her mind.

_This when mother nature rips apart the fault lines_

_This the type of thing that makes a grown man cry_

_When heaven shows its teeth and the planets are aligned_

_This is not a game_

_Don’t get in my way._

A grey van drove past, old, rust on the rear bumper. The car swerved.

Aesis ran.

* * *

Vincent leaned against the house, taking in air while he surveyed the landscape. Someone wealthy owned that house, someone who could pay for a green yard. A family who apparently had not applied their refined eye for topiary detail when vetting e-B’n’B customers. _A family of lawyers, maybe, or ex-Shinra executives. What they might think, sipping their poolside daiquiris in Costa de Sol, to know the one-time son of heaven’s dark harbinger was_ _stress squatting on an infinite loop in their dojo_? Near the trees, Vincent saw a bird bath; a proud robin enjoyed its offering.

He heard muffled music down the road, approaching. Heavy breathing. Vincent readjusted his stance, redistributing the weight of his crimson cloak to better obscure his face.

“Is she coming?” Tifa’s voice, beside him. Vincent nodded slightly. “Yes.”

Tifa crossed her arms across her chest, mirroring Vincent’s stance. “Should he be here?”

Vincent grunted. “Have you spoken with him?”

Tifa shook her head with a force that seized Vincent’s eye; she looked so uncomfortable.

“What’s he like?”

“He is… He’s not unlike who he was before Nibelheim, I believe, but he is so raw. The severance of his connection with Jenova is palpable… His mind, his memories are returning… he has confided a desire for redemption. But he is still selfish. So hurt. So angry. The reckoning before him is… he’s unpredictable.”

Vincent didn’t know how to speak the sort of reckoning Sephiroth faced; he couldn’t imagine it.

It was a hodgepodge of muttered observations that didn’t leave room for Tifa to navigate her rage; she chaffed at the sympathy in Vincent’s voice and scowled. “That poor man.” She sighed; she didn’t want to attack her friend. “I’m sorry, Vincent… I just… When you look at him, do you really see Lucrecia’s son?”

“…Yes. At the very least, he has his mother’s determination.” The current of compassion for Sephiroth in his tone overwhelmed Tifa too much to hear his guilt.

“You don’t see a murdering psychopath?”  
  
“I see the ruins of a man. Perhaps those ruins are my own… Perhaps if I had not been so selfish in my grief, so possessive, I might have stopped it… I abandoned him. If he is alive now, and lost, I know that Lucrecia would want me to help him. Don’t you think Aerith would want the same?”

“Maybe Aerith would tell him to get fucked,” Tifa muttered, conceding the point. _If there was a chance,_ she thought, _of course Aerith would help him. She always was too fucking generous._ In the birdbath, the robin’s feathers puffed, shaking water at an irritated cardinal who’d arrived to vie for its space. The cardinal pecked in retaliation. _Oppressive bastard,_ Tifa thought, suddenly and vehemently wishing the bird would drown.

As Aesis jogged over, she felt more alone. They had grown more distant in the preceding days, spoken less and less in confidence. She had balked in the moments she couldn’t avoid watching Sephiroth interact with her; he was infuriatingly awkward and still seemed to draw Aesis out of herself in a way Tifa had never seen, an observation that left her livid.

“Is it ready?”

“It’s done scanning,” Tifa’s response was noticeably curt; Aesis frowned.

“Bad news?”

Vincent heard Tifa’s distress and took over; the gesture only served to aggravate her more. “You were right, Aesis.” Tifa scoffed.

The robin drove its beak into the cardinal’s neck; its foe puffed up, shaking water; it moved back and forth, betraying ambivalence. _Stay and fight, or fly away?_

“Shinra wasn’t targeting you, or Sephiroth,” Vincent continued. “It looks like they’ve set up checkpoints across the city, bioinformatic scans.”

“What? What are they scanning for?”

“I’m not sure, but it’s genetic. Whatever it is they’re looking for, the readout is extremely complex. Aesis, you tripped their system. Did they say anything to you?”

“‘Monster’, ‘mutant’ … ‘Rape that mutant bitch’, one of their team leaders memorably instructed.”

“What did you do?” Tifa asked, already irritated with Aesis’ response.

“Argued the importance of affirmative consent. It blew his mind.”

Tifa scoffed, imagined one-liners flying over brain-soaked cement. “I bet.”

“Mutant…” Vincent frowned.

Aesis looked at Tifa for a moment and explained. “Backwoods militants like to throw that word around. This territory is decimated by the mako reactor, and most of these men are suffering. No jobs, heavy imports on food… The militants blame monsters. It’s Shinra propaganda. Shinra’s convinced them to hunt survivors of Hojo’s experiments in retaliation for Shinra’s own crimes… a hateful way to destroy evidence.”

“They could be scanning for Jenova’s codons. Or mako tags. The code they use is more complex than that, though…”

“So we don’t know,” Tifa’s voice took them all off guard. “We don’t know what Shinra was looking for, but whatever it is, they’re scanning for it city-wide and, of course, Aesis checks the box. So this means Shinra’s back, right?”

Aesis frowned. “What do you mean _of course_ —”

“Well, you’re special, so—”

“What the hell is that that supposed to mea—"

“—Yes,” Vincent interrupted. “Shinra is back. They’re at least organized enough to send out these scans.”

Tifa ignored him: “And if we weren’t all already in enough danger, we have a “hurt” and “angry” genetically engineered elite SOLDIER upstairs who could lose his whole goddamn mind at any moment and—”

“Two.”

“What?” Tifa’s lip pulled.

“Two hurt and angry elite SOLDIERs. I’m standing right here.”

“Aesis, this is not about you!”

“We should have this meeting later,” Vincent pulled his cape as he turned, swift steps under a furrowed brow. Aesis snapped, “One, it feels like this is _a little_ about me, and two, you said do this! You said you understood. Where is this coming from?”

“Really, Aesis?” Tears were in Tifa’s eyes. If Aesis couldn’t understand how untenable it was for her to share space with Sephiroth, they must have been living in different worlds. “I’m trying to be a good friend to you, but this is so hard. I know you’re lonely and I understand that loneliness is difficult for you, I really want to accommodate that—”

“—You want to find a less condescending way to phrase that?”

“I’m trying to be a good friend!”

“You’re pissed off! Don’t turn that around into—”

“—No, I’m not mad at you.” Aesis laughed. “I’m not mad,” Tifa continued; she felt off balance, her mind was going blank. “I’m just… I’m trying to understand, and I feel like you’re attacking me.”

“ _I’m attacking—_ I'm in an impossible position! What should I have done?”

‘Fight him! Kill him! Leave him there!”

“No!”

Tifa paused, staring at Aesis in wide-eyed frustration. 

“You could have at least called me when you found him. You could have included me. You didn’t. I can’t do this. You’re wrong, Aesis. This isn’t the right thing, this is so, so far beyond the horizons of wrong… If you and Vincent want to pretend that _Sephiroth_ is a stray puppy, that what he did doesn’t matter… And no one is going to ask me if I’m on board with it, fine. I’ll leave.” Tifa turned away.

“Tifa, that is not _at all_ what we’re trying to do! You know that!”

“What do I know! I'm trying to be a good friend, Aesis, but this is too much.”

The robin and cardinal were rising in the air; pecking each other as water in the bird bath, long forgotten, churned beneath them. The robin beat its wings to fly away; the cardinal pursued. Nearby, Aesis’ phone rang.

“Tifa, wait! What… Shit, it’s Barret.” She held the phone to her ear. Tifa glowered, tears in her eyes, but stayed. _No news from Barret_ , she thought, _could be unimportant._ Down the road, a grey van with rust on its bumper parked; near it, the robin and cardinal lay against each other, fallen out of the sky.

Aesis pulled the phone away, brow tensing. “Last night, Shinra troops attacked Midgar. Troops, Tif. An army. They’ve taken the plate. This is happening.”

“I- I want to talk to him. Give me the phone. _Give me the goddamn phone_!”

Aesis looked at her palm, then froze. Behind Tifa, she saw movement; in the trees, two heads emerged, gas masks behind streaking foliage. “Tifa!” Her voice was choked; the air was thin, metallic. Aesis gasped for breath, reeled forward. She saw Tifa slump down, saw behind the masks, another man. Red eyes, older than she remembered, the lines of his smirk were carved in the leather of his face.

“Nims.”

“Take her,” she heard Nims’ voice as she dropped forward, plunging into darkness, into nothing.

“The other one?”

“Tifa Lockhart. Bring her, too.”

* * *

Aesis remembered Tsukahara’s words. _I assess the power of a will_ _by how much torture it endures, and knows to turn to its advantage._ With all other power stripped away, in binds that could contain a SOLDIER first, her will was indomitable. She knew that. She did not need that lesson again.

“What I’m saying,” she grunted, “is in the _decades_ of bioengineering research Shinra put into SOLDIER, how did ‘knock-out gas’ never make it to the drawing board?”

“You missed my point.”

“No, Tifa, I got your point. I’m actively ignoring it.”

Aesis’ vision was blocked by a burst of light, the pain hit. She was screaming. She heard another cry, shouted in unison with her own; it was Tifa’s. Tifa was talking again; out of breath, her nerves refracting, her tongue dulled.

_Keep her talking. Keep her pissed._

“It had to be Sephiroth,” Tifa continued, steering the conversation, “because it’s you, and your colossal superiority complex. You wouldn’t settle for medium crazy… _Aesis_ has to go for balls-to-the-wall, 190-proof horseshit crazy.” Aesis groaned in pain; Tifa heard a scalpel pierce her friend’s hip as a blade sliced her skin. _Ribs._ She rocked; a breathless cry choked in her throat. Tifa heard Aesis yell, low and deep, an animal’s roar. The sound pierced the air with an edge sharp as the blade cutting her thigh.

“Aesis!” Tifa gasped for her. 

The scalpels retracted, one stayed lodged; Aesis and Tifa slumped in their binds, gasping for air. They’d been dragged to a Shinra outpost, a condemned building. Aesis recognized a surgical suite, jerry-rigged to the wall’s electrical supply; Shinra technology. She and Tifa were bound to separate gurneys, propped upright; Nims stood in the corner of the room, near a tray of assorted weaponry. He listened to the conversation with a bemused smirk; his fingers poised over the suite’s controls with the refine of a sculptor. 

Nims had growled that they were worth as much to Shinra dead as alive, had described a range of imaginative ways Shinra could leverage their bodies for political gain. But this was beyond an execution, this was a level of sadism for which he offered no justification; _then, he never did. There was always a cover, there was never was a why._

_There now, he’d intoned, his voice leaving a repulsively paternal taste in the air. Are you hurt?_

“Tifa,” Aesis growled, ignoring him, “We’re already being tortured, is it too much to ask that this conversation pass a fucking Bechdel test?”

“You know what, Aesis?”

“No, tell me,” Her teeth clenched, “I really give a shit.”

“Fuck your Bechdel test.” The scalpels retracted.

Aesis leaned in. She had to hope Vincent had seen them be taken; had to hope she could keep them alive long enough to be rescued.

 _I wouldn’t want you to hurt too badly—_ With some effort, she blocked his voice out.

She had to do anything she could to pull Tifa away from Nim’s bait-and-switch: his allowance of an arbitrary end to their agony. _Nothing was more dangerous than to let Nims be the one who decided when the pain would end._ “You sure you’re not mad at me, Tifa?” she sneered, “because I’m getting some mixed messages and _I understand that anger is difficult for you_ but if you’re pissed, we should probably talk through it before it turns into a _whole fucking situation_!”

Tifa cried, “Yes, I’m pissed at you! You selfish fucking hypocrite! When you showed up and asked me to play roommates with the flaming asshole, oh, _GOD,_ fu-uck—” Her last words trembled; scalpels came down. Pain exploded through every cell, the conversation evaporated in her mind. “Tifa, flaming asshole!” “The _asshole_ who killed my… Ahh-huh!” A knife sliced her. “Oh gee,” Aesis sneered, “Was rescuing Sephiroth _insensitive_ of me?” Tifa took a determined breath and yelled, “When you brought him to my goddamn house was that you trying to _pass a_ _fucking Bechdel test?”_

“God,” Aesis groaned, “Get over it!”

“What the hell did you just say to me?”

“How long are you going to let that shit own you? I said get over it!”

“Fuck— Cloud was right, you know, he never trusted you. He was right. After everything, you chose Sephiroth.” Aesis closed her eyes as a flash hit her. “Aesis, fuck you!” Tifa yelled out.

Aesis cried in pain, her eyes opened with dulled resolve. “Oh, I’m here for this. Fuck me? You offering?” Aesis felt impact; the pain knocked her head back. Tifa was silent, dropping further in the gurney. “Tifa!”

“Fuck… How…” Tifa’s words blurred together; she pulled herself back into consciousness, back to the fire in her ribs. Aesis groaned, “You were suggesting a new era in our relationship.”

“Please. I’m not the one you want to fuck, Aesis. Just tell me this,” Her words were slurring, “How much do you expect me to go through in service to your bullshit trauma? How much do you expect me to _give you_ , Aesis?”

Aesis hissed, “I expect you to get through a _hell_ of a lot more than this, Tifa, come on.” Tifa groaned, her eyes flickered shut as her body slumped. “Come on!” The rage, the hard love in Aesis’ voice was more powerful, somehow, than pain. More powerful than abyss.

Aesis maneuvered a surge of anger: “And speaking of stupid attempts to rescue broken men, you better give me at least as much as you wasted on Cloud.”

“Hah,” Tifa sputtered a soft laugh and came more upright, she tasted blood. “Bitch.” She gathered her strength. “You act like you’re so much better than me,” Tifa continued through shallow breaths, “like this is about some lofty ideal… don’t leave a man behind. Don’t kill when… unnecessary. Please. The tension… between you two… way you look at him.” Tifa yelled, “Do you fully comprehend how fucked up that is, Aesis!” 

“Fine!” Aesis gasped. “Fine. He’s brilliant, ferocious, sensual, he’s captivating… complicated… so beautiful it hurts. Is _that_ what you want to hear?”

“No!”

Agony crested as the scalpels landed; together, they screamed. Somehow, the pain was both hideously redundant and fresh, each impact impossible to ignore. It was getting harder and harder to recover; Aesis was digging deeper into chthonic depths, into sex and rage she didn’t know she had. Nim’s bemused smirk flashed; the blades retracted. She braced.

“He’s also an emotional trash fire who can barely relate to me as a human being, but I don’t give a shit, when we get out of here, I’m gonna fuck him right back out of his damn mind. Did you hear me, Tif? You want selfish? A _ll of this…_ all of it is happening so I can get laid.”

Tifa groaned, “Glad it’ll finally happen for you.” Another hit, another scream.

“And it’s gonna be good,” Aesis coughed and spat at the taste of blood. “I mean drag-down, walls crumbling, whole city blocks collapsing… I’m talking the kind of sex that legally requires a zoning permit.”

“I hope a building falls on you.”

“Guess I’ll find out why Cloud keeps going back for more.”

Tifa growled, “Fuck you so much.”

Nims grinned, his finger hovered.

Aesis braced, flashing teeth. “Honey, make up your mind.”

Pain hit.

They cried out for each other.

It took a few more minutes before Tifa collapsed in the gurney, unconscious, her breath barely audible; Aesis tracked its sound with all her energy. Soon, Nims was walking to them. Aesis could see the lines of his face fold in a chilling smile; his cruelty was exactly as she remembered. Vile, infuriating. Infuriating that such a pathetic man, a man who had time and again shown himself to be so obliviously thin-skinned, could ever, _ever_ , be given the power to cut her _._

She needed to divert his violence away from Tifa.

“Staying in the shadows this round, Nims? Having performance issues?”

She tasted new blood as his fist hit her mouth; she twisted her head, coughing. She watched Nims shake his hand; “That hurt,” he accused.

Aesis choked out a burst of laughter. "Poor you."

“It’s been a long time since I’ve had you alone,” he regrouped. “I'll have to change course soon. Did I hear Sephiroth's name? Now that, Shinra will want to know more about.”

"Did you? I don't recall."

"Mm, your friend seemed quite confident. But rest assured, I've some ideas that might inspire you to divulge."

Aesis reeled. Her voice was faint, her words blurred together, but still, they were unyielding. “Did a thought cross your mind, Nims? What a lonely journey that must have been-nahh!” She screamed into a burst of pain.

“You’ll regret that.”

 _Too easy._ She chuckled. “I really won’t.” Aesis could feel liquid in her lungs and tried to spit blood in his direction; her muscles didn’t respond. Her voice stayed firm, trapped in her throat. “Eat shit.”

Nims raised a thin poker, red hot. “Compared to what you will eat, a delicacy.”

Aesis’ eyes were hard. If she didn't talk, it would be over too soon... she needed to drag it out longer. She understood Nims’ breed of sadism, what he needed from the people he tortured; the degradation of another was the only intimacy he knew. It was the lynchpin of his precariously fragile sense of power. If she held herself together, he would keep her alive longer; he would _need_ to break her before he could let her die. It made him Shinra’s model torturer; it made him easy to play. She felt terror, terrible helplessness, at the thought of what was coming and forced herself to laugh in its face. “Isn’t this a little transparent? I mean, I get it. This is the part where you punish a woman who intimidates you with something sharp and phallic. You always were so fucking boring.” She coughed on blood. “It’s torture,” she deadpanned.

Nims sneered, “You haven’t seen punishment.”

Aesis laughed on a shallow exhale, her body was trembling, she felt the pull of surrender, of abyss; to speak meant pain that left her shuddering. “I hate to go there in such an inopportune moment, Nims, but… next time you need a toy to replace your tiny… ego… why don’t you do a girl a favor and just pick something bigger.”

Nims eyes came unhinged; he was yelling, but she couldn’t hear him. She felt a pain unlike any other and screamed; there was no sound, nothing but white hot and the cacophonic whirl of her pulse, beating outside of her. Shadow was closing in; at that moment, an enormous sword ripped the wall apart. Aesis’ vision was telescoping; she could make out flashes, myopic details in a haze of darkness. A leather glove pushed Nims into the wall, a punch followed, air whirred in a pure tone as a blade plunged; it pierced Nims’ chest. A flash of mako-green, ethereal eye, feline pupils, soft, silver hair on her chest as her wrists and ankles came free. She gasped for breath. Aesis braced as she started to move, she was screaming, she realized, as she ripped out a scalpel that had lodged in the crease of her hip. The world was muted, dizzy, the room around her seemed consumed in agony; she heard herself make a sound that wasn’t human.

She heard her name. _Aesis._ “I’m here.” _Here._ He was close to her; the still waters in his eyes were boiling over; his gaze surged with a manic, murderous energy she had never seen before. “Sephiroth,” she gasped. She reached for him and felt contact. _Here._ “T-Tifa.” For an instant, Aesis lost control, her head fell against the concavity of Sephiroth’s sternum; she was everywhere all at once. She was pain exploding in air, exploding in time; his chest was the only comfort in the world. Aesis felt an instinct nestled deeper than her bones, an instinct honed over years of torture, years of agony, and knew she couldn’t stay in that comfort. _Here, it was time for pain. “_ Tifa _,_ ” she tried to say. She was holding onto him; she could taste the salt of his sweat, heard herself moan, her teeth against the muscle of his neck. “Get Tifa,” she pressed clumsily against his collarbone in her friend’s direction, and pushed herself away, back to the pain. Sephiroth resisted, she saw his hand on her stomach, white light from his fingertips traced her wounds. Cure; healing magic. Aesis moaned, and suddenly her hand was alone. The softness of his hair left her skin; searing pain filled the vacuum of its touch. Aesis drew her focus to Nims. He was still alive, shaking hands, inarticulate moans and terrified eyes as he grasped clumsily at the wound in his chest. She pushed off the table; her grip on the scalpel tightened.

Outrunning the edge of oblivion launched Aesis into a predator’s rage; She lurched forward and brought down the blade; her eyes like a mauling tiger’s, her voice cracked like a block of ice.

“You wanted me alone.”

“Aesis, stop!” The sound of Tifa’s voice brought the room into focus. Taken aback, Aesis looked around. She was kneeling in front of Nims, scalpel in hand, ready to drag the blade from his stomach to sternum. Sephiroth had freed Tifa and was standing back as her friend reached out to her. Tifa gasped between words, “Grace… Aesis … I don’t want… To watch this… Again.” Aesis’ hand locked in place as every muscle in her arm tensed. She screamed out, threw the scalpel aside with an unsteady jerk. Trembling, she rose to her feet. “Tifa.” The words of her promise ran through her mind:

— _If I’d asked you to extend this kind of grace to Hojo, would you have listened?_

— _You know I would have._

Aesis’ hand flexed as she reached for a handgun beside her. She looked back; her friend met her in a glare and nodded slowly. “Are you sure?” Aesis paused, Tifa nodded again. Aesis tossed the gun; Tifa spoke the same words she had cried out earlier, this time with far different meaning. “Fuck you,” she said, and fired once, into the center of Nims’ forehead.

Aesis moved to the gurney. “You’re a lunatic,” Tifa gasped for breath, reaching for her, pulling her shoulder. Aesis winced. “I never realized… You wouldn’t break. You lunatic...” She grabbed Aesis’ neck and brought her face close. “Ae… You kept me fighting. I—” Aesis was tearing up. “I give a shit, Tif. I give a shit. You can’t give me… you’re right— I’m so sorry—”

“You did,” Tifa exhaled. “But it’s over. I love you. It’s over.”

“I love you.”

Tifa squeezed Aesis’ shoulder and looked past it, making eye contact with Sephiroth. He stood, watching, inscrutable once more. She pushed off the gurney, wrapped her arm around Aesis for support; Tifa found her feet. She realized that for the first time since he’d arrived, she could look at him. “Is that what it felt like?” Tifa directed the question to her friend. “What Nims just did to me. Is _that_ what being raised by Shinra felt like?” Aesis’ eyes widened; her expression softened. “Yes,” she whispered. Tifa looked back at Sephiroth. Her rage and fear were crossed by something new. She nodded slowly and took a long breath before she said to him: “Then I think I understand you.” Her voice was dignified; Tifa turned away as abruptly as she could, clutching her side. Sephiroth closed his eyes.

Vincent was at the hole in the wall; Tifa fell into him and leaned. 

“Where are we?”

“Shinra stronghold. The building is clear.”

Sephiroth walked up to Nims’ body and knelt. He stared, eyes held several seconds in the grip of steel. He studied the folds of the man’s face, shriveled in fear; how weak he looked, in death, how fragile. He remembered a giant of a man, a pillar, no one so small and scared as this.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and nearly attacked.

Aesis.

“Did you know him?”

He nodded and stood, wordlessly.

He stayed behind her, his fingertips light against the small of her back, helping her steady as they walked through the traces of lifestream that had gathered, collecting dead militants. Sephiroth passed through it, watched green fluorescence carry on, unpolluted by his presence. Aesis turned, stilled in a moment of confusion to watch his face. He was so tall, she realized, the contours of his neck were far away. His distant gaze met hers, shifting flashes of hostility and contrition bright in burning eyes. Aesis wanted to tell him something, but no words seemed to capture it.

“Thank you,” she managed finally. Before he could think, he felt a burst of warmth; his thumb massaged a soft place just over her hip, with a start, he pulled his hand back and turned away. He was cold again.

Tifa called out, “Ae, where should we go?”

Aesis walked again, irritated. “I could tolerate a luxury spa.”

“How about a luxury _drink_.” _._

 _“That works_.”

* * *

Sephiroth watched water condense on the edge of his glass; transformed against the cold, molecules became liquid on its surface. He watched them slip down the edge like gentle tears, felt wet against the skin of his finger. He closed his eyes.

“Are you all right?” A gruff baritone.

He answered honestly, “ I was remarking on the organizational potential of extreme temperature.”

“Hm,” Vincent frowned. _Amazing that this was a man who struggled to connect._ “It's impressive, isn’t it, for its ability to transform.” 

“It’s a state change,” Sephiroth replied. It wasn’t clear if he was adding to Vincent’s statement, or correcting him. An abrupt quality encapsulated his speech that left an automated aftertaste. It was a quality that fell away so abruptly when Sephiroth felt; in the throes of his heartbreak, rage, shame, Vincent could hear a richness of nuance, flooding in untamed currents deep within him. It had frightened him; Aesis had explained, her own demeanor a shade more passionate than would have been comfortable. _It was very rare that anyone in those labs helped us understand what we were feeling. We didn’t know how to relate to other people that way, we felt mechanical, distant. We often were… Maybe that’s what happened to him._

When Vincent asked, she said in that context, speaking with passion was an act of defiance.

Sephiroth had not been defiant. Until he was.

They’d booked a new rental home, their only real criteria a stocked bar. Medbot had whirred furiously, treating Aesis and Tifa; with the integrity of their bodies restored, they both ignored its advice and reached for hard liquor to dull the pain in their minds. A fraction as angry as he anticipated she would be, Tifa offered Sephiroth a drink; he accepted. He’d asked for Shkhivana, a Northern gin he once discovered on mission with Angeal. He became immersed in condensation as his glass grew colder, as the others chatted. Tifa discussed a recipe of her own called a Cosmo Canyon, and alluded to missing Midgar. Sephiroth withheld from metabolizing all but the edges of her tone and could still hear the ache of her longing for Cloud; that stirred a discomfort in him he thought best to avoid. Aesis had been quiet; she listened as Vincent spoke at length, describing his ideas about Shinra’s return. They were important, insightful. Vincent’s gravel filled so much of the air.

She avoided him. She’d sipped a bourbon on the rocks, smoldering; he could hear the rage of war drums cantilevered to her thoughts. It was no small feat, he knew, that she survived SOLDIER with such unapologetic passion. Emotional impulsivity should have been a handicap in battle, but she could compensate for it; it somehow it made her more deadly. Sephiroth realized that he felt her fire most powerfully that night, at its most threatened, than he had before. He wondered, for the first time, how she could do it; it didn’t occur to him to ask. He felt a terribly familiar disconnection; he longed to understand, yet had no idea how.

She made the call to go undercover in Midgar; the details they’d leave to another day.

They found a record player, Vincent came to his side as Tifa picked a song, explaining that it was necessary, the music, the expression. It was how they would heal; brutality and bloodshed would surrender to a night full of music, connection. _Confirmed,_ Medbot offered. Sephiroth felt something sharp and turned away.

Later, he watched the two women nod to each other with an understanding he didn’t share; he saw Aesis take Tifa’s shoulder and wondered how they could speak such obvious complexity without words. He had never seen it save, perhaps, in battle, in smirked threats… This was different. Nuanced, deeply personal, and safe; it was reciprocated, a language. He felt a pang of jealousy; he had never shared that depth of connection with another.

Discordant, jarring chords, jazz, crashing together into a wistful portrait of mourning that evoked for Sephiroth the unsettling peace of sunset over a Wutian battlefield.

His thoughts drifted to the sight of her body on the gurney; his madness in Nibelheim had barely felt real until he saw her laying there. Reaching to free her, he’d returned with bracing intensity to the first moment he reached for Jenova: in that instant, he could have burned down the world. A bolus of shame bled through him; automatic, intrusive, he shook it out of his head. Aesis had been laid bare against him, her armor stripped away; held in his arms, she was smaller than he’d ever realized. Moaning through her teeth against his neck, the strength of her hand against his chest, he saw something in her Jenova never possessed. When she pushed him away, he’d never felt so safe. Nor had he felt so ashamed.

He closed his eyes.

“She’s fine. She’s sleeping.” After a pause, Vincent motioned to Sephiroth’s glass with a metal finger. “Is she the one transforming?” He jarred; Vincent had watched Sephiroth think, he made an intuitive guess.

“I imagine not,” Sephiroth snapped, abruptly afraid of the sort of connection that only a few seconds earlier, he had craved. “She made that quite clear.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Vincent’s voice softened. “You’re like her. You must sense it.”

Sephiroth’s lip curled. “Vincent, I barely know what I am.”

“From history, you may be a man willing to give all of himself to another, when you hope they will give you a home.” Sephiroth winced, Vincent paused. _Had no one helped him know who he was? Had they only ever used his power?_ “It seems obvious to me that Aesis cares for you, Sephiroth, but unlike Jenova, she does not want to consume you. That could explain some of her distance.”

Sephiroth clenched his jaw in nonresponse and took a drink.

“A man once willing,” he corrected finally; he spoke coldly.

Vincent grunted. “A man, then.” He was obviously curious; Vincent wondered if Aesis’ story could be of use to him.

“When Aesis escaped Shinra, she trained in Wutai with Tsukahara Bokoden. Have you heard of him?”

“Yes, the pacifist.” Sephiroth exhaled. His jaw tensed. “I thought he died in the war.”

“He left Shinra with that impression; but he lived underground, ever the Wutian rebel. He took her in, it was a controversial decision… trained her in the Mutekatsu school.” Vincent paused, smiling at the absurdity of calling the sensei a pacifist. Tsukahara Bokoden had been loathe to draw his sword, but when he did, there was nothing pacifistic about him. “ _Saya-no-uchi_ , ‘invincibility without unsheathing the sword’…”

“I remember.”

“After the war, Saya-no-uchi was refashioned as a code of Wutian dignity. The integrity it took to implement those strategies in battle was viewed as an act of national defiance. It was adopted by revolutionaries, fighters who lost their faith. It was a way forward when no allegiance to power was conceivable, no dreams or honor left to imagine. The next revolution began in that dojo, the one that brought Shinra to its knees.”

Sephiroth smiled, his eyes crossed with sadness. “Dreams and honor…” He swallowed. “It’s been a long time since I’ve heard those words. Huh. Shinra’s only ideal is to win.”

“And yours?”

Sephiroth scoffed into his drink and listened as Vincent continued, “Tsukahara never told anyone what to believe; he helped them understand their history, create purpose and dignity within themselves. Aesis healed there, I believe, as much as she has; she found revolution. In the end, Tsukahara himself was the one who made her katana; and even now, she will try not to draw that sword. He gave her an allegiance to something.”

“I’ve seen.”

“Things are shifting.”

“What do you mean?”

“The planet is stirring.” Vincent frowned. “You must feel it. So much is being rewritten… I don’t know if we’re prepared.”

“I do feel it,” The line along Sephiroth’s cheek curved. “Without Jenova’s power, I didn’t think I’d be able to hear the planet at all.”

“Hm.”

“Vincent, I don’t know what it is to live with an unsheathed sword.” Sephiroth laughed darkly. “Sheathing Masamune…”

Vincent chuckled. “An unenviable challenge.”

The humor left Sephiroth’s eyes too abruptly.

“How can I understand who I am? How am I to even… deserve?” He growled deep in his throat.

“Sephiroth,” In Vincent’s voice, he heard paternal threads woven with compassion. It took him off guard, _every time_... It inspired such suspicion, such anger. Yet he listened.

“It’s a state change. When you summoned meteor, you sacrificed your memories. Perhaps you saw no value in them, then. You allowed your history to be consumed by hatred, sacrificed to Jenova’s ambition, and to your own… But attaching to Cloud gave you access to the man you were. You destroyed yourself, and _at the same time_ you fought to reclaim what you lost.

“Hmph. Aesis said something similar.”

 _He certainly thought highly of the woman he turned to so rarely._ Vincent sighed, irritated. “In Wutai, she learned what it means to piece together a soul fragmented… fragmented in experiences I imagine are not wholly unlike your own. I agree with her…. you wrought so much violence, so much destruction… for many reasons, I’m sure, but I think one of them was to reclaim your mind from Jenova’s control. So much violence, to free yourself. I do think it is by your own will that you’re here, that your memories are returning… Turn to your memories, Sephiroth. I urge you to meet the man you rained down such hell to rescue.”

Sephiroth looked away.

* * *

“Six hours.”

Tifa pressed her fourth Cosmo Canyon to her temple. “Come again?”

“A biopsych tidbit from the Wutian front. There is a six hour window,” Aesis shook the ice in her glass, “for alcohol to disrupt memory consolidation, so according to science if we want to forget what the fuck just happened we have… forty-six, coming up on forty- _five_ minutes to get black-out drunk.”

“Cheers.”

They tapped glasses. “Can you?” Tifa asked. “Get black-out drunk?”

“I’ll let you know.” Aesis took an emphatic swig of bourbon, letting her lips rest a moment against the edge of her glass.

Tifa felt puckish; reality had changed for her in that surgical suite. She could feel that who she was would have to reconfigure after that day; a brief window had opened up of unchecked boldness, bizarre elation and unconditional acceptance. She was somewhere beyond good and evil, the world could be whatever it was.

“Do you think you’re going to fall in love with Sephiroth?”

Aesis, more accustomed to torture than her friend, had not ventured into the curious between-space of shattered worlds. She growled, “This bourbon must be working wonders because I have precisely zero memory of using that word.”

“Well, it’s war,” Tifa replied. “War shortens the line between whatever that was and falling in love.”

“Trauma bonding isn’t love. It’s… exquisite collision stripped naked of self.”

“That sounded like a lot of exquisite stripping, just not of self.”

“…I thought I’d been tortured enough for one day.”

“Maybe so.” Tifa observed, “but I have to say, this is the first time you don’t look ten steps ahead.”

“…I’m not.” Aesis chuckled. “You know, in my files, they make me out like this one-dimensional superhero. Or villain. Whatever. It was how they justified what they did to us. What they meant was, we were strong enough to take it. To take anything.” Aesis took another drink. “Truth is, I’m usually weaker than I wish I could be.”

“If you loved him, would that be weakness?”

“I can love all day, Tif, as long as it’s, you know, not… but if I fell _in_ love with him? That would take strength I don’t think I have. I envy you that, you know. You love Cloud so easily.”

 _Fat lot of good it did._ Tifa thought a moment. “You know, when I opened my eyes on that gurney and saw him… For an instant, I felt this _connection_ , and I didn’t care about any of it. I didn’t care who he was, who I was, none of it mattered. Just for an instant.” Tifa sighed. “But if you hadn’t been there too, if it had gone on for years… I imagine there’s a part of you that never cared about any of it, that just wanted… to dissolve in that connection.”

“Uh huh." 

“It’s happened to you before, right?”

“It’s not a lack of caring. Not for me.” She shifted uncomfortably. “It’s like you drown before you realize you’re underwater. Who you are… It all slips away from you, it’s like sand through fingers. Caring doesn’t matter if you can’t close your fist.”

“I’m afraid of that. You’ve said it before, I didn’t understand… I’ve seen it happen to everyone but you. Cloud was always a little less there whenever he talked to you… he’d see your eyes and check out. It makes me so mad, because he won’t answer my calls but I know if I dropped Sephiroth’s name he’d be here in five minutes, back to who he was then. He'd be back, but it wouldn't be for me. And of course, when Sephiroth found Jenova… almost all of who he was collapsed. I think I get it now. It’s like when you get that connection—"

“—That’s it.” Aesis interrupted, rough finality in her tone. It was too much. “That’s not what happened in the mansion. I took my mind back from that once, I won’t do it again. That’s it.”

“I know that’s not what happened, but come on Aesis, if you weren’t feeling it you wouldn’t have—”

“—I said that’s it.”

“Bullshit.”

There was a long pause.

“It’s like the world fell upside down today,” Tifa broke the silence. She was starting to come down; she felt afraid. “I don’t know where I’m going to land.”

“Smack in the middle of another war, looks like.”

 _Ah, the comfort of familiar ground… how quickly thoughts of war pacified the threat of love_. Tifa chuckled in relief, in grief. “Well, that lightened the mood.”

At that, Aesis laughed too hard. “It really did. Oh god,” she reached for her glass. “That’s so fucked.”

“Maybe this time, I’ll find a better way.”

“Mm. Maybe we both will.”

* * *

– _In breaking news, tragedy strikes Junon Harbor today as an elite SOLDIER goes rogue. Our correspondent is live on the scene. Lin, we go to you._

– _Thank you, Sonia. Behind me you can see fires engulf the Junon Harbor after a member of Shinra’s elite C-SOLDIER unit attacked the organization, resulting in hundreds dead within the SOLDIER organization and millions of gil in property damage. Shinra officials state that the rogue SOLDIER, seen here, is responsible for murdering the others in her unit. She is armed and extremely dangerous. In a press briefing, local representatives describe the fear spreading through Junon tonight. The question on everyone’s lips: Is SOLDIER a threat to global security? In response to allegations of insufficient security, Mr. Heidegger, head of Shinra’s department of Public Security, had this to say:_

– _…Cannot attribute the actions of one bad apple to a blight in the bunch. Many good, loyal men and women died today at the hands of a single, deranged SOLDIER gone rogue. The individual responsible for this will be hunted like the animal she is, she will be punished. The people of Junon and families of the SOLDIERs who died today will know swift and decisive justice._

_There you have it, Sonia. Aesis, SOLDIER, first class, wanted on charges of high treason by the Shinra Electric Power Company. Civilians are advised to exercise extreme caution—_

Sephiroth paused the video. He’d changed into black linen lounge pants; he could feel the air move through them. His silver hair spilled over the definition of his naked back. He turned his wrist, leisurely stirring a glass of Shkhivana as he dragged the timestamp back. A faint, hollow smiled crossed his lips; he felt anything but happy.

– _the SOLDIER, seen here in security footage…_

Blood streaked her face, soaked exposed skin of her chest, of her shoulder. Her curls were slicked back in a regulation bun that left her elegance as sterile as a surgeon’s knife. She was rage frozen in cruelty; absolute disconnection pervaded her, seemed to carve out the full depths of her soul. He had never seen her so alone, he had never seen her so terrifying. A flick of her wrist, an explosion; the screen was static. It was a relief, perhaps a guilty one, to see her that way. _Wounded, bleeding, killing without mercy._

He knew a piece of him belonged in that.

– _…Cannot attribute the—_

He must have watched the footage twenty times. He dragged the timestamp.

– _the SOLDIER, seen here in security footage…_

Sephiroth paused on Aesis’ hollow eyes, wondering in paranoid exhaustion if he’d seen judgement at his voyeurism flash through them. He picked up a file he’d placed next to his drink. Even an inch from his arm, the dossier felt unreachable. _Nibelheim Incident, Subject S-02,_ its cover read. _Final Report. Top Secret._

He saw Genesis’ face, remembered his heart breaking; he felt the pressure in his chest, he could not remember the feeling.

He hesitated. His eyes narrowed.

Somewhere inside him, a border was collapsing. He wanted to recoil from himself with the same magnetic repulsion that had fueled him in summoning meteor; this time, without Jenova, he had some small choice to stay. His eyes steeled, determined. His finger rested on the sharp edge of the dossier’s cover. Guilt, remorse, all things save seething contempt, save anxiety, seemed to evaporate on contact with himself.

But _Gods_ , in that moment, he was determined to win.

_Meet the man you rained down hell to rescue._

Sephiroth braced, and with all the force in him, he opened it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! This is pretty self-indulgent stuff (I'm weak). I would love to know what you thought.  
> Plot 100% inspired by that episode of Firefly.


	6. Nibelheim Files, Episode 2. Contrapasso pt 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aesis takes a call from an old frenemy,  
> and something is wrong with Sephiroth.
> 
> CW: This chapter contains dissociative trauma, graphic violence and deals with themes related to child abuse and human trafficking. Hopefully, it does it in a way that is dignified, but the content is there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I decided to illustrate a scene from this, ft. my girl and this ex-SOLDIER she knows.  
> IT WAS FUN but I seriously underestimated my Illustrator learning curve. It's unfinished, but I'm done with it.  
> Music referenced in this chapter is What Else Is There, by Röyksopp, and Axolotl, by The Veils.

The home was isolated in the Nibeli terrain, far enough off the beaten path to require a legal waiver. Monster territory. It stood to face the sunrise with a broad view, unobscured by civilization; jagged rockscapes loomed, like gem stalagmites lit in pastel. Serenity in a wasteland; the air tasted like a battlefield. A fog had rolled in; near constant precipitation alight over the desert left the impression of a planet at war with itself.

_I am the storm, and I am the wonder._

_I am flashlights, nightmares, and sudden explosions._

Aesis had kept her back close to the house as she moved through a morning meditation, through cascading music, sword in hand. She finished with an odd energy just under her skin; the surreal landscape left her senses heightened. She felt a chill, wrapped herself tighter in a shawl; baby merino blended in silk, a textile she carried to clothe the sharp degradations she remembered each morning in softness and dignity.

_A little girl. Small hands, soft fingers in maladroit articulation, tightening around a glowing orb of red materia. A face; white shapes whose blurring edges danced. She saw blurred shadows of rabid eyes, a miasma of lips, moving._

_A screech rained down, an unworldly force ripped the air apart. Napalm skies were exploding overhead, the ground was erupting in flames._

_A different girl opened her eyes;_ Aesis recognized them as her own, unenhanced, grey, her pupils dilated orbs whose wide circumference was out of step with the fluorescent lights bearing down on her; _gods, those lights burned_. She forgot the girl grasping for materia as her memories of the orphanage resurfaced. _White stars set her field of vision on fire. Every cell hurt, her bones ached; the treatments fusing her genetic structure to Jenova’s caused a sort of pain language was unfit to describe. She grabbed at a dull fragment of tile chipped off her bathroom floor. The texture of unfinished stone against her palm, she rocked against the wall of her cell; she remembered it as if she was outside herself, she was there, close to shock, wondering if she’d survive as her focus held firm on the rough texture of that tile._

_Those hard edges were the only thing that kept her in the world._

Aesis rolled a rock between the fingers of her free hand, feeling hard edges of chipped stone. Her breathing was strong; each breath was a pillar that positioned her on the edge of anger.

Her phone dinged, she exhaled. _The flashbacks came and went;_ her life was an enduring negotiation across time. She dropped the stone and answered with eyes on the horizon.

“Mimi, it’s been a long time.”

“Aesis,” came a rich woman’s voice, saturated in luxury that stood in stark contrast to the spartan dawn. “I need your help.”

It was a short call.

Aesis tightened her grip on her sword.

_If I am the storm, and I am the wonder,_

_Would I have flashlights, nightmares, and sudden explosions?_

* * *

She poured thick espresso to fill an oversized coffee mug and introduced the mission with the name Mimi preferred, Madam M. Tifa was skeptical, but weighed her impatience to leave Nibelheim with growing concern as she listened. It wasn’t like Madam M to ask for Aesis’ help. She judged anyone who needed another's aid too harshly, and her relationship with Aesis was too complex; They were luxurious, angry women, each accustomed to being the most powerful person in the room; everything they had in common inspired edged admiration between them, seared with competition. Aesis was usually inclined toward understanding, yet reacted with vicious hostility to Madam M’s dealings with Don Corneo; Madam M retaliated with her own explosive temper.

Between insults stitched of excessive adjectives, Tifa felt respect between them.

Her own relationship with Madam M was nonexistent. It lacked the recognition of Aesis’; Madam M had no discernable interest in Tifa’s gentleness or compassion and dismissed her easily, snide derisions of athleisurewear notwithstanding. The memories caught her, though: Meeting Aerith in Don Corneo’s mansion, the plate… Tifa swallowed. Madam M made her remember.

Now, with Sephiroth in the room next door, remembering hurt more than ever before. Tifa couldn’t count the number of times she’d reached out to her friend, asking if it was alright, asking if it was right. She asked if it was what Aerith would have wanted, asked if she was just setting up more of her friends to die. Silence made the ambiguity deafening, it positioned her on the dark side of a treacherous edge. She wanted to be forgiven; she wanted more than anything to know that she was doing the right thing. With so little of Aerith’s light to illuminate the darkness, there was no way but fumbling forward.

Nibelheim had changed since the war. When Wall Market’s economy collapsed, slum dwellers moved outward; Nibelheim was a ghost town, an empty shell whose restored quaintness and singed underbelly were quickly transformed into a refuge of vice. Here, long removed from any remaining vestige of Shinra’s control, militants led uprisings and gangs became brutal enforcers of provisional government. Don Corneo moved in eventually, and with him, Madam M.

Gods knew whatever trouble she was in, it would be one more thing to trip on in the dark.

“It’s tactically sound,” Aesis was saying. “She can pay us, put us in touch with a biohacker. Someone who can hack Shinra’s code, fit us with the IDs we’ll need to get into Midgar… But to be honest, Tif, it sounds like she’s in real trouble. Even if it puts us out of our way, I want to help her.”

“I want to do something good,” Tifa replied, nodding.

“Who?”

Vincent. Tifa and Aesis looked up, confused. “The biohacker,” he clarified.

“She didn’t say.”

“I don’t like that,” Vincent frowned. “There are dangerous people here, it would be wise to know more before getting in bed with them.”

“I wasn’t planning on taking this conversation to anyone’s bed, Vincent, but don’t let me keep you from a good time.”

Vincent grunted, the faintest smile crossed his solemn eyes.

“Enjoy your jet fuel, Aesis.”

“Mm,” She smiled. “I will.”

 _'Good morning' would have been easier_ , Tifa thought, watching their barbed conversation unfold.

It took a few minutes after that for Vincent to realize that Sephiroth wasn’t in the cabin. Tifa reacted first. She was weightless, her stomach dropping as the rest of her suspended in air; the three of them looked at each other for a moment and burst into action. Her heart was racing, she felt the pressure in her ears. _She knew it. She knew this would happen._ The fear burst into her throat like a geyser: “Something set him off.”

 _Aesis,_ she heard, _saying they didn’t know that—_

Vincent came from his room: “He was reading about the massacre. He’s been reading the Nibelheim files, he found… I told him to confront his memories, I thought—”

 _She knew it_. Tifa felt the air leave the room; she heard sound like a plane lurching off the ground. She struggled; carpet, her feet on the carpet, were escaping her. _It was going to happen again.  
_

“There he is.” She jerked at the sound of Aesis’ voice, at her relieved exhale. Sephiroth was standing on the balcony, both hands cupping a mug of tea. Steam danced out into the air around him, he was staring out, his solemn, adversarial gaze seemed to carry for miles. He caught the sight of them in his peripheral vision and nodded slightly. Tifa gasped, turned away. Vincent and Aesis made eye contact; it was Vincent who walked to the front door, crudely shoving a folded sheet of paper he’d taken from Sephiroth’s room into his pocket. Aesis watched him walk, squinting in scrutiny before she turned toward her friend.

“Tif, you okay?”

She shook her head. “I thought… That scared me.”

They talked about it, a cursory conversation. Tifa felt her heartbeat decelerate, seeking normal like a stalled engine, a little sick at the thought of their next mission. _She wanted to help someone_ , she remembered. _She wanted to do something good._ Aesis passed her trough of espresso. “You want some?”

_Gods, she did._

* * *

“You average firsts might have had more time.”

Something about him was off, and he wouldn’t admit it.

It was in the way he turned, recoiled, automatically, whenever her weight shifted too close.

The look in his eyes, more distant than usual, and simultaneously, more determined.

It was his insistence on insinuating that she was average. It had begun in earnest that morning; as it aggravated her, he seemed to lean in. When he didn’t, she saw, he couldn’t settle on a topic; he seemed to recoil from every moment of conversation not grounded in a notion of his own superiority.

It was the distance he put between them with that word. A contrived, artificial separation; _but then, did she really know that? Maybe compared to him…_ Aesis shook her head and looked away, annoyed. It was bullshit and she knew it, but Gods, it had wormed its way under her skin. _If he had taken the time to ask her a damn thing about herself he would understand how wrong that word was._ It seemed engineered to separate them, at the expense of her own capacity.

It wasn’t how he usually spoke to her; something about him was off.

Vincent and Tifa had agreed to kill time in the shops, leaving Aesis and Sephiroth alone. Tifa had volleyed the word “fun” with determination; Vincent reacted with an expression like he’d stepped on a Hedgehog Pie. He’d looked at Tifa and gone with her anyway. What fun Tifa would have in this reincarnated Nibelheim, Aesis was unsure.

“But have you?” She was asking, not gently. “Had fun?”

That was the topic they had settled on, at her expense. The notion that she'd had a sort of fun that eluded him was a bit ridiculous; she'd suffered so many of the same things. But in that moment, as he grasped for the security of superiority, he couldn't see what they shared.

“I remember with… Genesis. Angeal. Angeal was another first, he was my friend, once. We would sneak into the Com Sim on Level 49 and… spar, when the seconds were out. It was… fun, but…” _The word was an odd fit to his lips._ He trailed off, aware of the extent to Genesis’ aggression for the first time. _Genesis had taken their play somewhere lethal, just as he had tried to do, for an instant, with Aesis; she would have shut that down immediately,_ he thought. Her reaction, her challenge, had changed something for him. _Angeal had reacted too,_ he remembered _._ Angeal had understood that they were beyond fun, _why hadn’t he?_ That fight had left him so confused, it had left him ashamed.

 _Like_ … _No. He had to hold himself together, and that meant he couldn’t think about it._

He pushed it from his mind.

“So lethal violence was your fun?” Aesis intuited. She smiled drily. “That explains a lot.”

He swallowed. It frightened him that her words had changed his perspective. “Lethal, no,” he recoiled. “Perhaps you would have found that lethal.” _Why was he lying?_ He felt as if he had betrayed something fundamental; he looked at her, then away. Her eyes flashed. “I painted.”

She was surprised. “You paint?”

Mm,” he smiled, feeling a sense of calm for the first time that day. “Rarely. Landscapes. I enjoyed the smell of linseed, I remember it vividly.”

“Which landscapes?”

“Wutai.” He gave a sad, slight smile. “I’d paint the fields in sunrise, as if we’d never been there... I’d paint birds flying over them, flying… away.”

“It sounds hopeful.”

“Does it?” Sephiroth swallowed. “Perhaps it was.” She felt it again, the sublime ache of him. The landscapes he described seemed so disconnected from the quotidian humanity of the world and yet so deeply rooted in its heart. She wondered how it was possible to be so captivated by someone with whom she was so utterly annoyed.

They stopped a few moments.

“Sephiroth, are you sure you’re okay being here? Something is wrong—”

“—Um, excuse me, Ma’am.” Aesis looked down. A little brunette she placed at six or seven had positioned herself to block their path. Her fear was evident in the tremble in her voice, in the widening of soft eyes that had not yet learned the necessity of concealing their vulnerability to the world. “Your friend,” her chin poked in Sephiroth’s direction. “He looks like the hero in the show my dad watches, you look like General Seh… Sethof. Are you him? My dad says not to talk to strangers, but it’s okay if you’re heroes, I think.” Sephiroth scoffed; Aesis took a knee, meeting the girl at her level.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s my sister. We were playing and I saw her walk off with a strange man. I can’t find her. Can you help me?”

The little girl shifted her weight, rolling her foot nervously. Her hair was brushed in the back, Aesis noticed, the stains on her clothes looked fresh. Her eyes were devoid of hunger, devoid of suspicion. Someone had taken care of this little girl; _If she went off and stumbled on a kidnapper, she’d be eaten alive._

This, of course, suggested that to Aesis’ mind, there were six and seven year-olds who _wouldn’t_ be eaten alive. By that age, she realized, she and Sephiroth had both survived things that would have decimated the adults around them. By that age, it would have never crossed her mind that an adult would protect her in the storm; at worst, they were the storm. At best, they seemed as sturdy as a tarp in the wind. The children forged to successfully navigate the dangers of Nibelheim were busy fending for themselves; in the jungle, that little girl’s sweet reverence only made her easy prey. _Likely, same was true of her sister._

“We have—”

“— I have a few minutes,” a shadow darkened Aesis’ eyes before they synchronized with the effortful gentleness of her smile. A warmth was radiating from her, a hard and soothing energy, that hadn’t been there a moment before. “She’s probably around here somewhere, huh? A few extra eyes can’t hurt.”

“Thank you!” The girl described her sister. As she ran off, Sephiroth looked at Aesis with surprise and watched her hardness lose its tender quality. “You want to help?” she asked him.

She was already rooting through the car when he agreed. Sephiroth arched his eyebrow as she loaded an enormous handgun, semi-automatic, something closer to an assault rifle than a conventional pistol. She looked at him and caught his critical curiosity. She asked: “Are you a purist?”

“Looks like Turk business,” he said. SOLDIER didn’t usually have need of guns; he was used to delegating, following a clear chain of command. _Something about this put him on edge._

She decided not to point out that stopping a kidnapping was identically the _opposite_ of Turk business. “Welcome to the revolution,” she replied.

“Hm. Vigilantes.”

“We’re rebels,” she answered, observing the judgement in his tone. “Is something wrong?” She watched Sephiroth shake his head and didn’t believe him. “Let’s go,” he turned, walking.

Something had upset him; he thought with determined myopia that it might have been her disregard for command structure; _she hadn’t ordered him, she hasn’t asked his permission…_ He looked at her and laughed at the idea that she would ever take his orders. What he'd read the night before, the little girl's long brown hair, the determined look in her innocent eyes as she stood scared in the street, none of those things had crossed his mind. He was still upset.

“In the mansion,” he interrupted the silence, “you said you’d lead. What are you doing now?” Aesis scanned the road: it curved around dilapidated exteriors, Shinra’s efforts to rebuild had fallen away to reveal burned, fragile structures. A few homes were occupied, a few boarded up. Behind them, the road hooked into rockscapes, twisting in the direction of Mt. Nibel. _That forbidding landscape, that desolation._ He shook the familiarity out of his mind; he could not escape the sensation of rushing away. _Running from what?_

“I'm walking,” she replied on an edge. “This is a kidnapping, not a battle. Do we need a command structure?”

“What else is there?” He asked distractedly, his eyes darted from the char on a nearby house to a sudden movement behind it. For an instant, he might have wondered if he was responsible for the destruction; the thought halted, unformed, in his mind, the guilt attached to it evaporated. In its place, he felt a sick sort of energy, his edges grew sharper. “Friendship?” She suggested with an edged tone he thought was meant to pick a fight. He looked at her for a second. “Something moved,” he began walking. Aesis clenched her jaw.

"You know, you fought with me without a command stucture already," she reminded him.

"I was barely conscious."

They turned the bend toward a backyard.

It was them. She heard the cry of a little girl as the shadowed figures of men emerged from a nearby house into a wide yard; they were walking to a car. One of them hissed for the girl to shut up as they dragged her. The car’s trunk was open, she saw a pile of weapons alongside electronic equipment. A camera rig. Aesis jaw clenched. “I don’t like it,” he frowned. “If we rush in one of them could take off with her, or kill her. We don’t know what they’re equipped with.” “Big men, bullying a little girl,” she muttered. _That sick energy returned_ , he shook it off. “They look like the type to religiously underestimate me, I think I can get them away from the car. I’ll take point.” Sephiroth looked at her. “That’s too cute by half.”

Aesis scoffed. “It’s strategy. You go in, they’ll be terrified. If I go in… besides, I like close range,” she muttered. He felt an obstinance that utterly belied his appeal to command structure.

“You assume I don’t?” he snapped. She pushed back.

“Your sword is ten feet long.”

“Seven.”

“ _Oh_. I stand corrected.”

He glanced up, looking at the rock formations above them, the vanguard of the Nibeli forest. “Hmph. Have at them, then. I’ll cover you.”

“Mm,” she nodded. They were inches apart, the teal mako of his eyes locked in her steel gaze; unsure of how to begin, irritated voices competed. “G—” “—Go!” “—o!” They stared another moment, her glare flashed; they broke hold. Aesis rolled behind a nearby shed. She watched his coat disappear behind an edge of rock..

The kidnappers were muttering; a hush fell over them as they heard her footsteps approaching. Aesis stopped far enough away to suggest timidity; far enough away, she hoped, to pull them from the car. “Let her go!” She yelled with a high voice, held in her nasal cavity.

“Look, Steve, a girl with a gun,” one of the hooligans laughed. “Careful now, sweetheart, that thing will knock you off your feet.”

“She’s too scared to reach for it, look at her! I know,” Came a voice behind her, “let’s cast her too.” _Cast? The camera._ Aesis felt cold as she put it together; she tried to look afraid. _What do you say baby,_ she heard. _You’ll be a star._ Another one, a head higher that the other three, from the outhouse; his eyes were fueled with tweaked sadism, his green hair poked out under a dirty hat. _They were high_ , she noticed. It would make them more ferocious; probably, it would also make them more stupid.

Sephiroth watched, uneasy. He was witnessing a process he’d never seen from the outside. Aesis’ voice had changed completely. She sounded weaker, unthreatening; that unnuanced vulnerability was belied by the steady, calm tracking of her eyes. She had read them in seconds, and she was right. It was an easy demonstration of the tactics Vincent had spoken of, a psychological claim to victory before a single weapon was drawn. He recognized with discomfort that her performance might have affected him, too; _before_ , he wouldn’t have thought twice before rushing in.

As with Jenova.

 _Mother_ , his own words were in his head. _Don’t be sad, mother. I am with you now._

Jenova had not been sad. She’d known he would _religiously_ underestimate her. She’d known he would view his vulnerability as her own. The only heartbreak he’d been able to imagine he thought was hers; just as these men could only imagine weakness as Aesis’. Jenova had only needed to step back and watch him trap himself in the snare of his own projections. Now, Aesis was doing the same to these men.

Was he like them? Would Jenova have taken his mind as easily if he had not assumed so much entitlement to hers?

By comparison, he realized, Aesis didn’t want to take the mind of these men; she wanted to kill them. She wanted to protect that girl. Did that distinction matter?

Perhaps it did.

Aesis stepped back.

“Wait guys, she’s _…”One of them had some sense._ She tried to finish his sentence: _Armed? An ex-SOLDIER? Obviously going to kick your ass?_

Whatever he’d intended, his friends overrode him. “Nah, she’s short. You afraid of a girl?”

_Cool._

The others stepped closer, now in enthusiastic agreement; the car was unattended. _She was so angry._ Aesis turned and stepped back, her hand on her chest as she moved them further, just because she could. She let a few sobs resonate in her nasal cavity; she checked that the car was abandoned. _Ready._ She stopped dead, her stance abruptly sturdy. _What you say to that, doll?_ one of them asked. Another cry, her voice fell suddenly and she looked up, the cry became a laugh in her own voice: “Gotcha.”

It was whiplash; the change in her energy from helpless anxiety to sadistic fury incapacitated them more effectively than a punch. That followed; just as their eyes betrayed confusion, her fist collided with them. The first was immediately terrified, he went down quickly; a second followed as her elbow collided with his throat. A third lunged with a punch; wildly telegraphed, a blow meant to punish her, the man’s mind had identified a threat but his body was still reacting to the idea of a girl. She ducked long to his left, blocked a sloppy hook and grabbed the arm before he could snatch it back. She growled, her dominion over his limb staked with primal ferocity as his bone cracked. _I_ _t made her murderous that even outmatched, this exploitative pig was still trying to punish a child._ Every ounce of rage she’d held at feeling unseen converged into that moment.

She pulled his stomach into the force of her knee. He stumbled, gasping. Her fist came to his nose; the hooligan staggered backward. Aesis kicked dead ahead; sent flying into another’s charging torso, he went down, she saw green hair stumble. The green ducked her punch, lunged; she twisted to the side. “Psychotic bitch,” she heard: Green Hair maneuvered behind her; going for a blood choke, the hat flew as her hands went up. She broadened her stance and twisted low, heard elbow crack rib. “Bitch?” Aesis smirked, his jaw cracked at her fist’s impact. “You were just calling me sweetheart, I’m starting to think you didn’t like me.” Green Hair’s shirt tore in her hands as she leveraged him to the ground, he was pinned under her knee. She wrapped the fabric taunt around his eyes to hold his head in place, his hand gave stunned protest; the camera rig caught her eye. “Smile, you piece of shit.” She pulled her gun to his forehead and fired once. Bone cracked, his skull was an entrance wound, hair gone. She stood up.

Lifestream settled over the field, collecting bodies. The hooligans were gone.

The little girl was stumbling out of the car; her eyes moved together as she took in the scene, but only one seemed to focus on Aesis, the other was dull, looking through her. _She was only half there._

Sephiroth jumped, Masamune in hand. He saw ground rushing up, cold steel in his eyeline…

 _Brown hair. Brown like that girl’s. Hands, praying, innocence._ _A surge of panic, a surge of shame ripped through him. He saw a pink bow closing in, pink dress… No. No._

He hit hard, his body took over and he rolled.

She ran to him first, he growled and held out his arm to keep her at bay; Aesis clenched her jaw and heatedly demanded to know what was wrong with him. Before he could answer, they heard a ping. A sound was coming from car’s truck, a beeping. Aesis grabbed it. “It’s a tracker. Something’s coming.” It was beeping faster.

“Shit,” she muttered.

Aesis took the girl behind the shed and crouched next to her; Sephiroth had not seen a child that destroyed since the war. Her eyes were so dull it was as if she wasn’t there, a thousand yard gaze, aimed at nothing. He had trained himself to look away, to feel nothing, when he passed children like this; _there was nothing he could do,_ he thought. _Living casualties._ Images like this one bounced off of his mind.

“Look at me,” Aesis spoke with a warmth whose depth and command defied imitation. It left Sephiroth cold, confused; he felt the nuance, the power he’d sensed in her when they’d first met, but after watching her trick those men he didn’t know if he could trust it. To his shock, the girl’s eyelid’s fluttered. “Look at me, hey. I’m Aesis. What’s your name?” The girl came into a faded sort of focus but did not speak; she left the impression she didn’t know who she was. She reached for the ground, let her fingers brush the dry earth around them. He wondered if she felt the heat of the sand.

“You’re in Nibelheim,” Aesis said. “It’s the first day of fall. Say it with me.” Slowly, the little girl opened her mouth. “Nuh-Nibel…Heim, first… day’ve fall.” Her voice was buried in the back of her throat. Aesis nodded. She picked up a piece of stone shingle, fractured grey tile, that had fallen from the shed roof. “Those men are dead. It’s over. You didn’t do anything wrong. Look at me,” the girl looked tired. “You survived. It wasn’t your fault. You survived.” Sephiroth watched light returning to the girl’s eyes, faint but flickering. “They were bad,” she said. Aesis iterated, “It’s not your fault.” “Nibelheim,” the girl whispered, her voice a little stronger. “Fall. Survived.” “That’s right. Now there’s one more thing coming, one more scary thing. This nice man and I are going to take care of it, alright? I want you to hold this.” She put the rough side of the shingle against the girl’s palm and closed her fingers tight in her own. Aesis squeezed. “Hold onto this,” Aesis said the words like fire. “That’s all you think about. Just hold on. It’s gonna be okay.” The girl nodded; Sephiroth watched her presence come back in her eyes, watched tears break through with it. The little girl screwed her eyes shut as a thick cloud passed over the sun.

Aesis stood, blinking back a tear of her own. _That was real._ Sephiroth realized, _what had just come from Aesis was real. It had brought life to dead eyes. She was protecting that girl, she was fighting for her. She was not Jenova._ Something in his chest cracked, he felt another surge, that energy. _There was no time._ The sky had grown dark, overcast skies grown so thick it looked almost night.

He watched Aesis draw Saya, watched her eyes harden. She was ready. “How does one do this in friendship?” He found himself asking, stiffly. "What do you... With a... I mean..."

 _With a girl?_ she wondered, but decided there wasn't enough time to roast him for that one. Aesis kept her gaze on the horizon. “This?" She let her blade fall, rooting its hilt into her hand on an upswing, and smirked, "sharp end goes in the other guy".

He smiled. “Shame we’re not in a command structure, you’d be a brilliant strategist.” Her eyes lit up.

"Would it be easier if I make you unconscious?"

It was hard to keep in focus.

“You recognize this thing?”

“No.”

Aesis nodded. “Then we improvise.”

Sephiroth intoned, wrily: “That’s fantastic.”

It was a tornadic shadow, a nebulous thing; in some moments it seemed stories high, but when she focused it seemed to blur, move out of step. “What is this?” She saw Masamune; Sephiroth was fast enough to cut through the shadow before it moved. “Some sort of optic shield,” He guessed. “Magic?” The shadow disappeared.

Aesis frowned. “That… was easy.”

Sephiroth’s brow tensed.

The sky stayed dark, Aesis scanned it. She inhaled, deep through her nose, felt her chest expand: the air had a strange smell, salt and putrefaction. "Fuck." “Hm,” he agreed.

In that instant, an ear-splitting crack, the ground at their feet split open; Aesis jumped as something enormous cracked through the air around them. She saw a mouth, teeth flashing; she saw a frozen image of red, glaring eyes. Aesis dodged the teeth and sneered. Whatever this was, it was powerful. Sephiroth’s eyes narrowed, his lip curled in a superior smirk. _He should trademark that,_ she thought. He was off the ground in an instant, Masamune lacerating an engorged appendage. She jumped; it hit ground. Red eyes flashed and disappeared. A new set of teeth, thrashing; a piercing shriek cut through the air and knocked her off her feet.

Everything went black. Silent. A blip in time.

She was back; even as she came to, she was launching to her feet. Her body was automatic, moving without her; she cut through shadow, saw teeth and jumped in time to avoid the assault of its screams. She fought as her mind returned; it took seconds.

He was fighting too. Masamune’s cuts, her own… _it was regenerating._ A mass of teeth, a cacophony of screams in miasmatic shadow, teeth replicating, again and again, over and over. Each cut became another set, more mass. It was growing, it was voracious.

“Will you stop slicing!” She screamed.

Sephiroth smirked. “As you wish,” he stepped back. He'd been distracting it. The tumult of ravenous heads charged straight at her, large enough to blot out the sky. 

“Shit! Keep slicing! Keep slicing!”

She parried, Masamune came down. Another splitting cry; Aesis watched a new set of teeth materialize and launched in the air, narrowly unphased by the shriek; she put out her hand and roared as a flames erupted around her. She watched razor-sharp canines catch in the blaze; to her shock, they retracted. The mass stumbled and lurched forward; hit by fire, the cuts Sephiroth left were cauterized, unable to regenerate. She took advantage of the opening with a dropkick that sent it convulsing; it was vulnerable. Aesis and Sephiroth made eye contact; she yelled a ridiculous abbreviation, _you— cut I— fire,_ and he moved Masamune’s hilt close, poised to strike. “Your cue.” “Mm,” she nodded.

Aesis was in the air; the overcast sky lit up in white light.

Their eyes met.

“What are you waiting for, a fucking one-liner?”

“You prefer unrepentant profanity?”

She glared.

Sephiroth leapt in the air; flashes of smoldering purple ripped the rock ledges around them apart, sending an explosion of stalagmitic formations in the air. He cut through the rocks, cut through the beast, raining down an orchestration of strikes in milliseconds; at that instant the sky turned red, hellfire exploded, incinerating the air around them. Aesis moved through the inferno as if she was made of it; he caught her in the corner of his eye. Her sword was returning to its nascent state; it glowed as if taken from a primordial forge. Hot as magma, a new blade burned underneath shifting plates of cracking steel. The rocks that touched her blade themselves became fire; he heard a searing cry as they hit their mark. _It was unlike any fire magic he’d seen;_ she caught something of it between her legs, she launched into a hurling rock, driving the molten glow of her sword into shadow. The whole mass erupted; a vesuvian eruption overtook them. Cut apart in flames, cauterized, writhing forms ripped apart in the light; the beast’s final shriek knocked them both through the sky.

_White light._

_He was in falling in air, cold steel in his peripheral vision. Pink dress, brown hair, hints of auburn flashing in soft light; he saw gentle water, his hands tensed to strike…_

His arms reached out; he grabbed her. Aesis felt the steel of his pauldrons, his full weight passed over her as they hit ground and rolled. She did not need to be plucked from the air and held, but in that moment he needed to save her.

For a moment, he felt better.

He landed on her, his weight held over her; she felt his touch, his broad shoulders were like a shield across her body.

“Unrepentant profanity,” she breathed. “Flambéed. Rare. A little bloody.” He smiled, a thin, admiring veil over depths of distant darkness; he stared at her with searching eyes. Aesis let out a sudden groan. Sephiroth’s forehead tensed.

“Are you alright?”

“Your hair is in my mouth.” She made a face. “I don’t know about your _average_ first, Sephiroth, but I don’t burn easily.”

His expression lifted in a smirk; he saw how he provoked her. His fingers grazed her skin as he pulled the offending strands away.

“Yes, you do.”

Aesis growled and pushed him off, pulling to her feet and running for the shed. When they met she had the little girl in her arms, that shingle tight in her small hand. They brought the little girl to her sister and stayed away, watching over them as they waited for their father to arrive. Aesis recalled his earlier criticism of egalitarian strategy, suggesting their fight evidenced the value of a more collaborative approach.

“Ah yes,” Sephiroth replied drily. “ _You cut I fire_. I’m humbled by the improvisations of such a warrior poet.”

She laughed and looked at him. “And he, in mocking, sought the tranquility of war, soft words too complex.”

He smiled; _if he had outwitted her earlier, Gods, she could return the favor_. Sephiroth stared determinedly at a patch of sky while he considered her retort. “That's too many syllables.”

“Rebel warrior,” she reminded him.

He glimpsed her taunting eyes.

Sephiroth felt himself flush and looked away. “Perhaps we'd be a good team,” he spoke softly. “Perhaps we would,” Aesis murmured. The light in her eyes dimmed too quickly. She struggled to digest the word _team_. She wanted it, it was desire gripped in her body in tension, but even as he offered it, he seemed to withhold. Fighting with him was… _exquisite_ , was the only word that came to her mind. But she still felt recruited into a position that was too unseen. She still felt something was wrong.

The girl’s father arrived; it was over. He watched the child be lifted in strong arms; he opened his mouth to speak, but Aesis was preparing to leave. _How quickly she’d moved from him._

A shadow crossed Sephiroth’s eyes as he watched her step toward the dusty street; he felt the rejection in his bones but did not understand it. His thoughts drifted to the Nibelheim file, to... His effort to push that file from his mind collapsed. _What would it do to her… What would she do…_ He had come so close to feeling free of it. It ached him to remember then, more in that moment than it had ached all day. _Letting her close to him could destroy her._ Sephiroth felt the shame flood him, so strong now; then, the _rage. The rage. How dare they— She would abandon him to it. At best, she would walk away. Just as she was doing now._

“Is something wrong?”

He could hear the traces of her warmth, firm, rich… _maternal_. _All for that little girl_ , he thought. It evoked an untenable jealousy in him, something— _he had to move._ He grunted and walked brusquely, pushing past her.

_It was rage._

* * *

He was barely able to speak when they got there. Madam M’s parlor was painted crimson red, it boasted stained glass windows, fully occluded. “Another church-like façade,” Aesis muttered. An ornamental doorbell carved with brass flowers hovered near her head. Sephiroth saw them; he looked away quickly. A sign next to the doorbell loudly announced CLOSED.

The door opened.

“Aesis.”

“Mimi.” Madam M stared down her nose when she saw Aesis’ armor. She curled her lip and pulled at the edge of her kimono, rearranging herself immediately outside of Aesis’ reach.

Aesis looked down; all that was left of Green Hair in the world was decorating her brass knuckles.

“Don’t you dare get blood on my carpet.”

They moved into a backroom; Aesis cleaned her gloves with a sponge soaked in massage oil as Madam M spoke. Sephiroth stayed behind, distracted; a photo on Madam M’s desk had caught his attention, sat atop a stack of headshots. The song playing low on her radio, distortion and screams, seemed to grow louder as he stared.

_I’m glowing bright, obsidian._

A headshot of a stunning woman with long brown hair, curled and decorated with proud red flowers, looked back at him. Bright green, soft eyes that resonated with familiar determination; a gentle smile that cut through him. _Aerith._ He remembered. _The Cetra._ He saw ground rushing up to him, saw cold steel, a pink ribbon flying through the air. _He’d killed her. He’d relished in it._

 _Un-elemental chemicals, got me growing six black tentacles._

There was no holding it back now. The pink became yellow; he saw yellow fabric wrapped around brown hair so much like hers, like his own, a new face looked up at him with the same expression. _Lucrecia._ His chest cracked open.

_Oh my soul, losing control_

_Who built this heart?_

The man’s horrified cry devoured the music, _Oh my God._

No one noticed the chime signaling that the door had opened, carved flowers ringing as he left; reeling, Sephiroth slipped out unseen.

Madam M was too busy describing Don Corneo’s newest and most lucrative business venture: children.

Vincent and Tifa were too horrified.

Aesis was too enraged, growling, “What do you mean, monster parties?”

“I don’t know,” Madame M sneered. “There are rumors of new monsters on Mt. Nibel… Vicious beasts. No one really knows what they're capable of. Rumor has it that when they’re done with them, these festering shit stains toss the kids to these beasts. They livestream it, the tickets sell for crazy. They call it a monster party, as if it were some derivative of a sleepover. It is beyond vile.”

_The monster from the kidnapping. The cameras._

“Livestream?”

“I’ve seen it,” Aesis interrupted. They stared at her. “No, fuck! No. Earlier today, we stopped to intervene in a kidnapping. They had a girl, a whole rig… there was a monster. Something I’ve never seen before. I think they were going to film it.”

“What kind of monster?”

Aesis looked up in alarm. Her mind was blank; she searched as hard as she could, but could not land her focus on the creature. Her gaze shifted with every effort, repelled, she saw rock, fire, steel; she could not see _it_. She looked up, eyes wide. “Tif, I can’t… I know how this sounds, but I can’t remember… I can’t remember what it looked like. It _just_ attacked us… But in my head, there’s nothing. There’s nothing.”

“How is that possible?”

“ _You cut, I fire_ ,” she whispered. “The rest is gone… Mimi, do you know what this is?”

“No. No one knows what these monsters are. I've only heard them described as inconceivable. Unspeakable.”

Vincent asked, “Why would Corneo do this? Is it just greed?”

“Greed and power. How do you think Shinra financed such a swift return?” Madam M snapped. “They look the other way, of course, pretend that’s not where Corneo’s money comes from. They speak politely, don’t let themselves see that their colleagues get off on it. The industry itself is worth billions of gil. Enough for an army.”

“Aesis, that is unbelievable. How could they—”

Aesis growled, “In what world is it unbelievable? Corneo practically sold women as a community institution, and nobody batted an eye,” she glared pointedly at Madam M. “Shinra has always bartered in the lives of children. SOLDIER, Aerith, Hojo’s experiments, the children they killed when they dropped the plate… Why would any of them grow a conscious now?”

“It’s sick,” Tifa shook her head. “This world is sick.”

“You’re going to need new job security,” Aesis turned back to Madam M. “I’m going to kill him.”

“I thought you aspire to mercy.”

“I do, Mimi, but I have to tell you, I’ve been coming up short lately. Is there any other way to stop him?”

“Of course not.”

“Then this is the ideological limit of my mercy.”

Madam M cocked her head. “I hoped you might feel that way. You might be my security, Aesis.”

“What do you mean?”

“I know you despise my affiliation with him. The women I sent to him were adults. They signed themselves away, they should have known what was coming.”

“No one consented to what he did,” Tifa interjected. “No one. Not then, not now.”

“The world is what it is. I’m not here to rescue suicidal women,” Madam M snapped. “They lived the hand they were dealt; by the time they got to me they were volunteering. Your friend,” she glared at Aesis, “is an idealist, even her morality breaks down along ideological lines; _I_ am a realist… But I have limits. I told Corneo to go to hell for this. He’s going to retaliate… There will be a battle for this town. I’m going to win it. I’m going to stop him, and I'm going to take everything.”

Madam M had learned that the N-3 served as the main corridor for Corneo’s ring; the children were smuggled to Mt. Nibel from there. The first line of business was recon; to trace out their route through the deserts.

For the first time, Madam M looked guilty.

“Ae, I need your help to put this right.”

“Put it right?” Aesis snapped. “A battle I can give you. I can’t put this right. You and I both know they will never be children again.”

“Then they’ll be in good company.”

Aesis lifted her head. "That's true," she said. She had felt demeaned all day, as a foil contrast to Sephiroth’s sudden superiority complex, as a child to be punished by violent men, and now, as a sword of vengeance; the shift between the three was a jarring transition. She was done.

“And when they’re in your company, what will you want from them?” She sneered. “Will you want a sword, or a whore?”

As Aesis left, Madam M called out:

“They broke your bones and set them to carry war, I can see that from here. You fight for justice like others fight for their Gods.”

"Yes, well." Aesis looked back, “The world is what it is.”

Madam M nodded.

Vincent interrupted them, a look in his eyes that froze Aesis in her tracks.

“Sephiroth is gone.”

At that moment, the ground rocked under her feet. Aesis heard explosions, cries; they ran outside. Townsfolk were screaming, running from the shadow of Mt. Nibel… Behind them, Aesis saw fire: houses on the edge of town, consumed in flames. “No,” she whispered, eyes wide. _Had he…?_

Tifa’s face was white. She heard the crackling of fire, another explosion, the eruptions of terrified screams.

"I should have told you, He read this." Vincent reached into his pocket and fished out the crumpled paper. It was a field report. “When she was pregnant,” he explained, “Lucrecia had premonitions. Premonitions of who he would become, what he would do. That's why she tried to kill herself, Aesis, that’s why she’s in the cave. Sephiroth knows that his mother tried to kill herself because of what he did.”

For a moment, the fire was outmatched.

“Are you kidding me!” Aesis screamed. “Are you fucking kidding me!”

“He was alright this morning. I wanted to give him space.”

Tifa shook her head.

“It might be him.” Vincent swallowed. He wasn’t seeing clearly through the fog of his own regret, he didn’t know if it was wishful thinking, _or if…_ “I think there’s a chance he went to her cave. I’ll go. I won’t give up on him yet. Maybe this time we can help him, before...”

Aesis had tears in her eyes; her sword was already drawn.

Tifa watched the flames move; she spoke through crescendoing screams. “It’s him.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been dancing around Lucrecia for a while, so I decided to just jump in and see what happens when Seph finds out what happened to her. If you like it, feel free to drop kudos or leave a comment, it means a lot :)  
> 


	7. Nibelheim Files, Episode 2. Contrapasso pt 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two women meet on a battlefield north of Modeoheim. Vincent reckons with his sins as the friends race to find Sephiroth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is shorter, but I thought writing these out in shorter segments might make them more... fun? IDK it's like 1 AM. If you have an opinion on chapter length, let me know -- I've had people ask for long updates before but looking back through previous chapters, I thought that might be a little much for one sitting.
> 
> Contrapasso is now three parts, not two. I wanted to further explore the theme of being seen in this; what it means to be seen or distorted by another, what it means to be used. That's a big part of this story. Recommended music... the entire soundtrack of The Old Guard? Mmm... Going Down Fighting by Phlotilla, Andrea Wasse, and Topher Mohr. I hope you enjoy :)
> 
> TW: Graphic violence, themes related to trauma

_Tifa never expected to face the front lines alongside Wutian warriors. Her life, obstinately unconcerned with protecting her sense of comfort, had rendered her expectations as futile as the AR-15 she’d just ripped from the hands of a Shinra infantryman. Her foot collided with his jaw; she watched a white cushion of snow catch him where he fell, white soon stained red._

_They were north of Modeoheim, a geography that made the name ‘Wutian war’ a misnomer. Those eight years had been seared in the narratives of the warriors around her like a gangrenous wound. The words used to describe this new violence changed; in Midgar, it had been called an ‘uprising, a ‘rebellion’. Here, it was a revolution, a ‘war of liberation’._

_On the continent, it was a war of guerilla tactics; AVALANCHE’s playbook had been reimagined to weaponize Shinra’s own hubris against it. Wutai’s psychological warfare was gaining reputation; rumors circulated of the woman warrior who’d tricked Shinra into making their records of the Sector 7 plate collapse vulnerable. The broadcast had decimated infantry morale; Heidegger ordered a vanguard of AssaultBots into Modeoheim, a demonstration of technical superiority meant to inspire allegiance, or terror, in those defecting._

_Cloud had been near a trance when he joined the fight; she couldn’t tell if he’d accepted in service to lost dreams, or if he was trapped under the gravitational weight of his adversary’s ghost, still searching for Sephiroth’s footprints in the sands of time. None of his explanations sounded convincing: through his mutterings about obligation, she couldn’t help but think part of him wanted to atone as canon fodder. For her part, Tifa had heard the rumors: they said the rebel warrior was the same treasonous ex-SOLDIER who had demolished Shinra’s base at Junon Harbor, they called her insane, they called her evil. Sympathizers called her an avenging angel, a totem of justice they would follow through the gates of hell. On the front lines, they called her commander._

_Maybe, Tifa thought, she wanted to know another woman who survived. Maybe the only way she knew to navigate her own grief was to stand alongside an avenging angel._

_Violent, vicious, a blast from one of Shinra’s AssaultBots launched them in the air; snow, dirt exploding around, there was no up, no down, not until they hit the ground. They landed in the divet of a trench, the air around them ringing. Tifa opened her eyes in time to see a wall of fire devour snow in front of them; the AssaultBot was behind them. Through the debris, she could make out the churning mess of its armory closing in; her heart clutched in her chest. She looked for Cloud. He was a few feet away, reaching for his buster sword with one hand and clutching his head with the other. Tifa saw bodies move as she turned; silent mouths were screaming, ringing echoed against the pressure in her skull. Tifa watched the AssaultBot bear down on them; she pulled herself up and gripped ice, craning her neck to glare at their enemy. At that moment, a woman’s silhouette parted the flames, kicking toward the Bot from twenty feet overhead._

_Tifa saw backlit, broad pauldrons like wings against the sky, a katana flashing in the cold sunlight. An avenging angel, she thought; svelte muscle contracted against an architecture of leather. Her strikes claimed dominion over the air itself; her entire body was an extension of her sword. The woman cut through the Bot’s armament and brought her blade down, staking a lunge atop on its cranial shell. Tifa heard an explosion and turned away, lifting a barrier to shield them from the force of the Bot’s defeat._

_She landed close to them. “Asshole,” the woman growled in atavistic intonation, reaching in a concealed pocket to load new materia. Her dichromatic eyes narrowed through ginger curls, she sized them up as she locked her armband in place. “You two have magic.” Tifa nodded, stunned; Cloud’s face had frozen. He was staring at her tensing, serpentine pupils, at their supple violence, their irritated dilation. Whatever had brought him to that sanguine snow left him paralyzed him as he looked in her eyes._

_“You still with me?” Cloud blinked. The warrior glanced in the direction of the bots. “Fire doesn’t do much to these things,” she exhaled. “But if we can short-circuit their AI we’ll turn this around. You have lightning?” Tifa stammered, “Yeh—uh, yes.”_

_“Good,” she continued._

_They knew what C-SOLDIER was, they had seen it on the news. It had chilled them; Cloud turned off the TV whenever they appeared. They had never seen anyone from that unit up close; here she was. The last survivor, her eyes a dynamic painting of Jenova’s memetics._

_“They have an IX-60 mako transducer in a truck behind the Bots,” she said. “It’s a generator, keeps them powered with the reactor down. If we can draw the Bots to it and overload its processors, we can use it to amplify an electric strike. That should level their line.”_

_Cloud was still staring._

_Countering him like the edge of her blade, the rebel stared back.  
_

_“Do you and I have a problem?”_

_“No, it’s…” Tifa rushed to explain, “You look like someone who… Our friend, she died…”_

_“Everyone here is fighting because they lost something,” the commander interrupted in fierce abrogation. “If your pain is going to get you killed, then get the fuck off my battlefield.”_

_Cloud looked at her another moment, then simply nodded. It was so unlike the kind tone of counsel Sephiroth had once given him, so many years ago, in a transport carrier, yet…. He had never remembered that day so vividly. “It’s alright,” he said, his voice suddenly gentle. Jarred, Tifa glanced at him. “Really,” he finished. Tifa paused a moment, torn between the exigence of their circumstances and the knot that curled in her stomach as she watched Cloud’s face. Her face an effortful approximation of his certainty, she echoed him: “It’s alright.”  
_

_“We need to break their line,” The rebel pressed her lips together. “I’ll go first. Pull the Bots toward me, but conserve your energy. When we get to the generator, light up the damn sky.”_

_Tifa nodded._

_The rebel warrior looked through them with a focused wild in her eyes; reaching to the ground, she took a stone left unturned in the blast and rubbed its edge against her palm. “Na zdoroviyeh,” she told them. The word came from a dialect local to the Modeoheim region; it meant ‘cheers’, laced with the gallows humor of ‘proceed at your own risk’._

_She tossed the rock and charged._

_The ex-SOLIDER carved a hole through Shinra’s offensive line, her sword moving with assaultive refine; before long, Tifa positioned to fight alongside her. Cloud took his stand a few meters away; as the distance between them grew, Tifa saw the buster sword’s blade land like a guillotine. Hurling through the air, Cloud was leading a pack of AssaultBots to them. The commander brought her katana through an orchestration of lacerations, disrupting a Bot’s defensive programming; she left it vulnerable. “Take it!” she yelled out, offering her arms as a brace; Tifa took her hands and used their leverage to hurl through the air. The Bot hit the ground under her onslaught. Tifa moved on._

_It didn’t take long to incapacitate the truck; she saw a blur of venetian curls streak through the air, cutting wounds in the sky, she saw mechs stumble around them, saw men turn to run. Suddenly, Cloud was beside her. He nodded._

_“Now?” She cried out._

_The commander landed with her back foot on the truck’s hood, front leg conquering its length in a lunge that dented its metal roof. Looking up, Tifa's breath caught in her throat. That stance claimed victory; even the air around the ex-SOLDIER trembled its surrender. “Heidegger!” She yelled, leaning back to point her sword at a Shinra media drone. His name was an accusation, a threat; it was a dedication. The commander cut bullets from the air, her eyes narrowed in unbroken focus, a subtle sneer crossed her soft, small lips; a glimpse of her canines flashed in the sun. Lightning cracked; the generator was glowing._

_She looked at Tifa._

_“Now!”_

* * *

_Tifa watched the flames move; she spoke through crescendoing screams. “It’s him.”_

Aesis followed her eyeline; the rising flames, the billowing smoke. She stood between Vincent and Tifa, maneuvering the hope and despair of both; _They didn’t know it was him._ There was no one there, no proof in that fire one way or the other. Aesis felt her own tears and blinked them away, trying to breathe. _They didn’t know it was Sephiroth._

She said as much, turning to Vincent, her head lifted in the affected poise that thousands of hours in the trials of combat had afforded her. Her eyes were a wet alloy of pain, fear, and determination; she had not felt that sort of loss, that sort of hope, in a long time. Aesis could contain the blaze; that was never going to be a problem. _What was waiting for them behind it… Ifrit’s singed asshair, she hoped it was a gas leak._

She felt the vicissitudes of Vincent’s grief, of his concern, more acutely than even the heat in the air. The look in his eyes pierced her; the wrapped leather of her gloves gripped his cloaked shoulder. She wanted to comfort him, though there was precious little comfort to be had. If he could find Sephiroth, perhaps he could offer the same. His jaw clenched in response to her gesture. _Vincent was not one to let himself be comforted._ “Good luck,” She said. “If I find him, I’ll stop him. I'll protect him.”

Tifa looked nervous. “Aesis, what if you can’t help him?”

She spoke decisively, “The fuck I can’t.”

Vincent nodded, the faintest hint of appreciation crossing his eyes, his crimson cloak billowing as he turned to leave.

The two women exchanged glances; they braced against the other’s resolve, and they ran toward the fire.

* * *

He stole a motorcycle and tore down the N-3 like a crimson bullet. The winds around him cut the air like a storm; as their steady roar dulled in his ears, he retreated into reverie. Vincent knew the way; he could find Lucrecia’s cave in his sleep. The changes in the route that bore testament to the war did not deter him: the checkpoints overseen by the weary eyes of rebels, the razor wire halos of concrete barriers. He passed crumbling walls that had once delineated the limits of Shinra’s control, their lengths rife with graffitied symbols of anarchy and slogans of revolution. He didn’t mind dodging them, snaking through the shadows of Nibeli rocks on backroads, where speed limits were suggestions, and no self-preserving person asked anyone else their business.

He hadn’t seen it coming. _He hadn’t seen any of this coming._

When Tifa had called him, he’s been in the forests near the Forgotten City, highlighting his solitude in the icy glow of the trees.

She was panicking.

_Ae found Sephiroth— Vincent, it’s him. I don’t know what to do._

Neither had he. He’d never known what to do; from the moment he’d woken to the challenge of destroying Lucrecia’s son, he had only known to do what was ethical. Nothing, not one single breath, felt moral. _His punishment,_ he resolved. _His penance._ Then he heard Tifa’s voice, yelling that Sephiroth had been expelled from the lifestream; he heard Tifa’s voice, crying that by some twist of fate, Sephiroth was human once more.

In that instant, a moral road opened to him. Vincent had been so close, the first time Sephiroth searched that mansion basement; he’d left Lucrecia’s child alone, abandoned to Jenova’s manipulations and the terrible force of his own grief, his own rage. Vincent left Sephiroth abandoned with none of the answers he might have provided, had he not been so lost in his own questions; he left Sephiroth with none of the dignity he might have offered, had he not been so mired in his own shame. _He had condemned her son to his own suffering._ Inaction had been his sin. _It had been his sin then, just as it had been his sin that morning._

 _How could anyone live with the shame,_ he wondered, _knowing their mother tried to die because of what they would become?_

 _Not become_ , Aesis’ annoyed voice, automatically, pierced his mind. _Not become. Do. Monstrosity is a choice, Vincent, it is not an goddamn identity._ She liked to say things like that, with the decisive intolerance of someone who did not have the luxury of objectivity. _Still, if there was anything that could push Sephiroth over the edge, it was the information so surgically laid out in that file. And he’d done nothing. Again._

That, he hoped to rectify.

 _Is it a choice you’ve made?_ he’d ask her. She’d look at him, memories of bodies playing endless in her large, serpentine eyes, bodies held in that signature blend of pain, remorse, and angry defiance. _Yes,_ she say _._ He’d ask, _Then what did you do?_ She’d pause. _I feel it. Every time, everyone_ , _I feel it. Next day…_ Her gritted resolve. _I make another choice._

Aesis’ monstrosity always came with a reason; there was such deep violence in her, but she made her choices to protect others, to protect people with less power than her. He found his thoughts drifting to Lucrecia, to her choices… _Even in suicide, she had chosen herself. He wasn’t the only one whose selfishness had condemned her son to his fate. It was poetic that in the end, Sephiroth decided he’d rather be human than a deified extension of a mother’s selfishness. But even so, how was he meant to give a damn about humanity if no one had ever fought to protect him? If no one refused defeat?  
_

He’d covered too much distance to see the smoke towering over Nibelheim in his rear view; the fate of that town was now well and truly out of his hands. _Was this another recourse of inaction? Was he claiming the chance to intervene, or was he surrendering it?_ Vincent revved the engine, leaning his weight into almost reckless speeds. _Could he help Lucrecia’s boy, or would he condemn him, once again? Was he making a different choice?_

* * *

She ran through the fire like she had been born in it. _Hadn’t she been?_ She held out her hand and felt the flames respond; they moved as if bound to her will, clearing a path under the cold eyes of Mt. Nibel’s gargoyle rock formations. As long as she could remember, she could control fire. It served her well; how many men, how many of their women, over the years, had rallied their efforts in magic and machinery to burn her alive?

How many had died for it?

 _If it came to it, why should Sephiroth be any different?_ She plunged her sword into the blaze. She wasn’t aiming for the ex-General; at the outskirts of Nibelheim, she and Tifa had crossed a group of Corneo’s hooligans fleeing into the Nibeli forest. She’d pulled the flames from the town in their direction, watched them tear up the mountainside; they’d followed the hooligans, running along the edge of the fire, fighting monsters smoked out in the inferno. Her sword came down again, followed by one of Tifa’s kicks, smacking a drake from their path. She rolled to her feet and ran. _Why not Sephiroth? To some extent,_ she knew, _he was guilty._

_Because of the choice he’d made. Because he had chosen humanity._

_Because she saw her own fault lines reflected in the fissures of his broken soul. Because in his eyes, she saw a history like her own._ Among those now-rehearsed motivations there was something new: _Because,_ she realized suddenly, _it had required the most desperate and acute crisis of shame for him to try to take from her in the ways most men felt completely, constantly entitled._

_Sephiroth was different._

The reactor appeared.

She saw hooligans running, Tifa flying to her right, sending one of their number to the ground with a ferocious kick. Aesis stilled, took in the scene: Corneo’s men were fleeing the reactor; its door had swung open, lit up in glowing embers. They’d been inside it. Fire, the cracking roar of its blaze, licked their heels; beneath the steps leading to the entrance, she saw the metallic rim of a hastily tossed gasoline can. Aesis screamed Tifa’s name, holding her back as she lunged into the chase.

“Tif, the reactor!” she screamed over the rage. “They’re using the reactor, we should—”

They heard a crack, like thunder, echo through the sky around them. The flames began to lick at the edges of a shadow, a silhouette; something moved across the sky. Tifa grabbed Aesis’ arm.

“Is it him?”

Flames erupted in the distance; Tifa saw a serpentine shape lit orange in the glow.

“It’s not Sephiroth,” Tifa exhaled.

“Thank Goddess,” Aesis’ head fell back in relief.

“Just Leviathan.” Tifa’s eyes widened as she heard the words leave her mouth. “Shit, Ae, they summoned Leviathan.”

“How in the hell did they—” Her friend looked to see the dragon raging toward them and pressed her lips together. It was built to the scale of a freight train, rushing toward the reactor at speeds that could rival a commercial jet. Aesis’ eyebrows lifted over her otherwise deadpan expression.

“Fuck this day.”

* * *

_There was a town a few miles from their encampment; its citizens had fled, leaving a fully stocked bar in the town inn abandoned. Rebels camped there that night; Tifa found her sitting atop the dusty grey marble counter, her leather boot resting on a ripped stool, wrapped in a black wool shawl. She opened her mouth to introduce herself and was interrupted before she could speak:_

_“Look, you helped me today. But the way you and your friend stare at me… I can’t tell if you think I’m your lover, or your aggressor. That can work on a battlefield,” The commander rolled her wrist, gesturing to the door. “Out there, it’s about what you, all of you, need. A father, a mother, a lover, a harbinger of death, infallible protection. I am those things for each of them, for your friend, for you,” her burning eyes lingered, “sometimes all of those things. But in here…” She scoffed. “Whatever you’re looking for, I’m not her.” She considered. "Your dead friend?”_

_Tifa exhaled._

_“Well I know you’re not her, you’re nothing like—”_

_“_ — _And there it is.” The commander offered a knowing smirk to the adjacent wall. “No. I’m not some contrast foil to your dead friend whose diametrically opposed personality structure will challenge you to love again.”_

_Tifa was taken aback; the commander could see her motivations, her pain, so deeply, so mercilessly. For a moment, her soul felt disarmed. What a warrior, she thought._

_What a bitch._

_“You know, Aerith could read people people too,” Tifa regrouped. “but she was nicer about it.”_

_The other woman looked annoyed._

_“ Well, fine. Who are you, then?”_

_The commander betrayed no intention of answering her question._

_“It’s called an introduction,” Tifa clarified. “Some people talk about their families, where they come from…”_

_The woman sighed. “Okay. I don’t have the energy to perform for you, so here's how this is going to go. You tell me all about your loving family and your sixth grade hamster and I pretend I give a shit. I say I have no idea who I was before I was tortured for over a decade of bioengineering experiments, drafted as a child soldier, and forced to watch everyone I loved be murdered by the people who called themselves my family. You look at me with a horrified expression, yep,” she gestured dully at Tifa’s scrunched face, “just like that one. I wait for you to resent the discomfort you’re feeling, ignorant of the emotional labor you’ve required of me this entire time. We both feel like shit, and scene. Fun chat. Bye.”_

_The commander returned to her drink; when she looked back, Tifa still sat across from her._

_“Why are you still here?”_

_“You didn’t actually tell me to leave,” she replied._

_“It was implied.”_

_Tifa scoffed._

_“Oh I get it, your warrior soul was sculpted in circumstances so atrocious that you're convinced no one could ever want to know you. That sounds familiar." She said to the commander what, on the a level so deep it evaded her awareness, she wished she could say to Cloud. "Well, whoever you think I am, I’m not her.”_

_“Come again?”_

_“I’m not her. Some innocent foil to your big scary trauma. I'm not that weak. I'm not that good.” Her voice broke as she emphasized the last word.  
_

_Her interlocutor sucked her cheek into a half smile, impressed. She answered thoughtfully, “Fair enough. But you do want to be innocent.”_

_Tifa continued, “And you know what, I did come from a loving family. We were happy.”_

_The other woman offered a vitriolic smile and sarcastically intoned, “That’s fascinating.”_

_Tifa glared.“…Then my father was murdered by a man who’d been subjected to a lifetime of bioengineering experiments and drafted as a child soldier. He butchered my father, he burned my family, and he razed my hometown to the ground. This world doesn’t care if I want to be innocent or not, and you elite assholes aren’t the only casualties of SOLDIER.”_

_The commander paused. “Nibelheim,” she discerned._

_“Yup.”_

_“So why the hell do you want to know me?”_

_“I was living in Sector 7 when the plate fell, and you told the world the truth. That means a lot.” Tifa considered. “And because something’s missing. There’s grief endless on the horizon and a world in flames. Talking to you feels a little like hitting a cactuar, actually, but for some fucked up reason, this is the most real I’ve felt in a long time.”_

_“Hm,” A bittersweet smile touched the stronghold of sadness that had claimed the commander's lips. “I’m Aesis.”_

_“Tifa. Tifa Lockhart.”_

_“You’re unexpected, Tifa Lockhart.”_

_“Do you have a last name?”_

_“Nope,” came Aesis’ terse response._

_“Cool, right,’cause of the big, scary trauma.”_

_"The very same."_

_Aesis jumped off the counter, reaching behind it for a bottle. Topping off her glass of Shkhivana, she threw down a few gil for the absent bartender. She positioned an elegant silhouette of wool around her arms and lifted her drink in salute._

_“Fun chat,” she said smoothly, a wink tracing the unnatural glow in her gaze. “Bye.”_


	8. Nibelheim Files, Episode 2. Contrapasso pt 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> aka, Spooky action at a distance.  
> TW: allusions to child abuse and discussion of neglect, mention of child trafficking in the summary, themes of trauma throughout
> 
> Sephiroth is left to confront the reality of Lucrecia's choice, struggling with the consequences of his judgemental nature, and the feeling that he is trapped as an extension of Lucrecia's destiny. Aesis and Tifa fight Leviathan. Afterward, Aesis asks Sephiroth to know, not project into, her mind (in the way my girl asks for things. You know, gently.) This chapter continues to explore the theme of being known, especially after trauma, and explores themes of sadism, culpability, and compassion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Recap: In the last two parts of Contrapasso, Aesis takes a call from Madam M asking for help, and Sephiroth stumbles on a field report (OG canon, sorry DoC I continue to pull selectively from you but fail you generally) stating that Lucrecia had visions of his crimes that led her to attempt suicide. No kind of self-loathing seems off limits in this game, so COOL BEANS. He attempts to navigate the pain of that discovery in silence, but as he and Aesis fight to protect a kidnapped girl, he's unable to. Sephiroth has flashbacks of Aerith's death that crescendo in Madam M's parlor, where he sees Aerith's features blend with Lucrecia's and flees.
> 
> There, Tif, Aesis and Vincent learn that Corneo is helping finance Shinra's return by running a child trafficking ring. Aesis realizes that the kidnappers she'd killed were likely Corneo's men, but she cannot remember the monster, an unknown entity Madam M can only describe as "unspeakable", that accompanied them. Vincent realizes Sephiroth is missing. They leave the parlor to find that the outskirts of Nibelheim have been set on fire. The friends split up to investigate and try to stop Sephiroth before it's too late. 
> 
> Vincent goes to Lucrecia's cave, hoping to find Sephiroth there, and Aesis and Tifa head toward the blaze. Aesis remembers the first day she met Tifa, on battlefields outside of Modeoheim; the battle ends when she, Tifa and Cloud use a mako transducer (made-up plot device similar to a generator) to amplify lightning magic and knock out Shinra's mechs. In that memory, Aesis is far more raw, and struggles with the prospect that anyone could want to know her. In the present day, the friends contain the fire and chase hooligans up Mt. Nibel, where they arrive at the reactor. Once there, the hooligans (or someone) summon Leviathan and flee. 
> 
> The song mentioned is Joni Mitchell's Let the Wind Carry Me. Other than that masterpiece, I'd recommend Enya's Exile for soundtrack material.

In all the years he had journeyed in pilgrimage to that cave, it had never occurred to him that another could need it as much as him. He almost collapsed mid-dismount when he saw the bike parked hastily at its mouth. _Had he been—_ He’d been right. Sephiroth had not attacked the town to exorcise the shame of Lucrecia’s last act, not this time. Not again. This time, he had fled, searching for her. He saw steel pauldrons, black leather, impossible lengths of silver hair, almost white, alight with the blue light of the crystal cave. _It was him._ He was kneeling before her with a posture that had not yet sacrificed its poise to grief.

Vincent was still braced; he noticed the tension in his abdomen as he approached. With Sephiroth there, it was a different scene; those crystals born of the planet’s lifeblood took on a frigid quality. _It looked_ , he thought, _as if Lucrecia was entombed in ice._ Cold. Alive technically, only inches from her son, but still completely inaccessible. He wondered, for a moment, if she might leave her stasis for him, but knew instinctively that nothing, no other, could pull Lucrecia from her shame, or make it possible for her to overcome her self-imposed condemnation. He wondered what Sephiroth must feel; _if it were him_ , he thought, _it would rip him apart._

“She looks so peaceful,” the other man whispered. “She looks innocent.”

 _She did,_ Vincent realized. Her hands clasped over her chest, her demure, downcast eyes; she looked like a religious sculpture, an eternal madonna. Yet there was her son, warmth and shame and sorrow at her feet, and she did not move. For the first time in that cave, Vincent felt angry with her.

He approached. The look in Sephiroth’s eyes was one of squared-off defiance: the fault lines of his expressiom were breaking apart to reveal a confused primordium of mourning, of longing. If he had any reaction to Vincent’s presence, he concealed it, save the slightest flutter of his eyelids as he felt the heat of Vincent’s body change the gelid air.

“I want her to tell me everything will be alright, to forgive what I am. I can’t—”

“Sephiroth,” Vincent’s baritone was as gentle as the wound was deep. “she did this because she couldn’t forgive herself. She didn’t decide to die because of who you are.”

“She chose… because I am a monster. It said—”

“—I know what it said. She did it because she knew you would do monstrous things, but she felt she was the monster. She couldn’t save you, so she chose to die. It was her penance—”

“—No,” he growled. “It was a choice she made for both of us,” his tensing eyes glared up through silver strands, pulling Lucrecia’s form into focus. “What it would have meant, to even see her face… To know if she loved…” he looked away, hiding hot tears. “Why didn’t she fight for me?” He was stuck there, he had been stuck there for hours, trapped in the loop of betrayal so fundamental, he felt its poison fester in his bones. _She knew what was waiting for him. Why didn’t she fight for him?_

“I’m here,” Vincent’s voice broke, “I am fighting for you now… too late, perhaps.” Vincent looked away for a moment, his dark eyes steeling, pushing against a current of shame that sent him recoiling inward. “Tifa and Aesis are running through fire. _They_ are fighting for you.” Vincent watched Sephiroth’s face tense; he turned back to Lucrecia. “Tifa is fighting for me?” His question felt like an interrogation. “In… a sense,” Vincent stretched his imagination and came up empty. “Aesis is fighting for you, certainly.”

He told Sephiroth what happened in Nibelheim.

“Aesis,” Sephiroth’s scoff cracked, dismissive, ripped from a place in him that seemed to ache outside of time. His worn eyes returned to Lucrecia. “I need my mother.”

Vincent understood, then; the unpredictable way Aesis’ mention seemed to agitate or soothe him, the incoherence with which he avoided and collided with her. He was aching for a sort of connection she could resemble but could not provide; to connect with her, longing for what only Lucrecia could give him, must have ripped open his wounds as much as it gave a simulacrum of healing them.

“Vincent, I need her,” he continued, the desperation in his voice left Vincent powerless. “and she’s right there. _She’s right there._ Why won’t she… why can’t I reach her? Why won’t she look at me? Why won’t she _touch_ me?” He buried his head in hand, stifling a sob as his other hand reached for the crystal around Lucrecia’s feet. The man was left in chaos; the helplessness in the one time-General’s voice contrasted with piercing acuity against the power of his form. He was so close to her, pleading for her, but for all of his might he could not force her out. Vincent hoped against hope that Lucrecia would wake; he wondered if she could even hear them. _Even if she could,_ he thought, _she was shattered by the possibility of atrocities that had already come to pass. How would she face them now?_

_I need my mother._

Those words should have broken that whole cave apart; Lucrecia did not move.

Vincent felt powerless as he surveyed the hard edges of mako crystal, Lucrecia’s unmoving, soft expression. “I’m so sorry, Sephiroth. This is wrong," he frowned into the admission. "You should never have met her this way.” His hand found Sephiroth’s pauldron; clawed metal fingers moved to soothe a steel shoulder. “She was too hurt. When I met her, she was… sweet, impetuous, determined in her ambition. She was unable to see through the consequences of her actions, she was childlike in that way; I was enchanted. I wanted to protect her.”

“She was a scientist,” his voice was seared with judgement. “It is inconceivable that she lacked a basic ideational grasp of cause and effect. If she’d cared for me, she could have… She could not have thought I was human. She couldn’t have. Vincent, it’s… abominable.” He looked away, hunched; finally, the pain seemed to crack through his posture.

Vincent exhaled, his thoughts were difficult to collect. He had long wrestled a similar sentiment to no satisfying conclusion. “I think she gave too much of herself away,” he said finally. “Hojo wouldn’t have worked with her otherwise. She kept that childlike quality to her mind, she subjugated her potential to his permission, to his ambition. It opened doors for her, but it… yes, it cost something of who she was. It cost who she could have been. It left her incredibly selfish. She could not have protected you,” Vincent realized. “She couldn’t protect herself.” A shadow crossed his gaze as he pulled into the distance of his memories. “Whatever might have allowed Lucrecia to keep fighting,” he swallowed. “I think this world broke it in her long before she had you.”

“She subjugated her mind,” Sephiroth sneered. “That, at least, we have in common.”

“You share her brilliance.” A defensive quality bolstered his words. “Her determination. You judge so harshly, Sephiroth. Don’t throw away the good in her. For your own sake, don’t throw away the good. I want you to have any piece of her good that can offer you solace … She knew you were human, in the end. She was sorry. It’s not much, but…”

“To have no good at all would be better than that,” Sephiroth snapped. “It would be easier to have nothing than to have _this_. She did not intervene; even in her grief, she condemned me. She condemned me to monstrosity. Don’t tell me it was impossible,” he added. “Even if it took years, she could have done _something_. She could have fought Shinra. Other women have.”

Vincent sighed. “Not all women are the same, Sephiroth. Your comrades can fight Shinra, yes; at least one would also say that Lucrecia didn’t condemn you. She would say that monstrosity is not an identity, it is a choice. An ever-changing, constant choice,” His gaze fell, “that will haunt you regardless of what you choose. Lucrecia would not endure that. She surrendered her agency,” Vincent swallowed, gesturing to the mako crystals. “You did something similar, once.”

Sephiroth scoffed. _He had. Entombed in mako, like Lucrecia, he had surrendered any true experience of choice. Like mother, like son,_ he thought bitterly. _Again. Was this eternally his destiny? Was this eternally his punishment?_

“If _you_ can endure it,” Vincent gestured to Lucrecia’s form. “You can make a different choice. You are not bound to her fate, Sephiroth.” It was as if he read his mind; Sephiroth closed his eyes as tears fell.

“Why should I?” He blinked through them, too angry, too unable to communicate his gratitude for Vincent's intuition. Feeling, for that fleeting instant, as if his mind was held and shared by an other seemed to gut him. _Nothing could be more painful than a little of what he so deeply craved in full._ “She didn’t want me. No one did. They only used me, they… If they didn’t want me when I had done nothing to them,” he asked through his tears, “how could they want me now?”

“I do,’ Vincent answered honestly. “I do want you. You know that people do.”

“How am I to endure… without her? I am still a bred killer. I have done such horrible things, I’ve… I’ve enjoyed it. Perhaps that’s why she’s silent,” he looked down. “Who could forgive such a thing?”

Vincent smiled softly. “If you didn’t judge so brutally, I think it would doable. It’s a shame, Sephiroth. Without compassion… I’ve no idea.”

* * *

She saw a pulse of blue light shoot out in their direction, a dorsal fin rushing them at speeds a freight carrier would envy. Aesis launched into Tifa, knocking them both out of Leviathan’s path.

Aesis looked out at the fire burning the landscape around her; she reached out her hand. Tifa watched her and nodded; she ran to distract the beast, flying into it with a kick to cold open her dance of combatives. Aesis felt the flames move, transmuted into something inside of her. The heat, the power, that seemed to boil down into her bones; in her body, the fire became something older than time. Her hand moved; she jolted. _She was slower than she anticipated._ The impact of Leviathan’s tail knocked the breath out of her, she gasped for oxygen in midair. She’d miscalibrated, she’d landed on her feet, looking up. The anger shining in her glare was personal now. _Audacious bastard._

 _But something was off. Her body wasn’t responding the way she anticipated, it was… slower. It was too tired. She felt like she’d been fighting all day, not just that night._ Aesis pushed her confusion at the incongruence away. She was slower than she should be. _Recalibrate_. He was rushing toward her.

The dragon lurched at the last second to direct its attention at Tifa; her expertise gave the impression that the martial artist was flying alongside it. Aesis felt the power return, humming under her skin, and did what she always did. It was a mental switch of some sort, she had never fully understood it. The fire Coreno’s men had turned against Nibelheim reappeared, as though funneled through her; the blast erupted around Leviathan and disappeared, exhausted. _It wasn’the most effective attack_ , Aesis thought, _but that fire couldn't destroy anything else_. She leapt into the flames, sword ready; the dragon lurched, hit back, a blast of blue light from its mouth sent them flying through the air to dodge.

They landed on their feet. She looked at Tifa, too tired for a long battle of swords, her eyes wet with her fear and her sadism, her power and her love. “Fire doesn’t do much to this thing,” she shouted. “If we—” Tifa already knew, Aesis could tell. The other woman smiled, an expression edged with fear as she understood; gripping her friend’s shoulder, she nodded. “Got the biggest transducer this side of Golden Saucer.” Tears cracked her eyes; they held to each other. Aesis felt alive in focused wild, felt a sort of ferocious love that defied articulation and pulled her forehead to Tifa’s. She looked at her friend as though she wanted to memorize her soul, and smiled.

“Na zdoroviyeh.”

She broke hold. Tifa ran toward the reactor. Aesis ran toward Leviathan.

* * *

On that edge of the N-3, the shadow of Mt. Nibel loomed over them. Far in the distance, the edge of the peak had gone abruptly dark, orange skies collapsing into a singularity of night. The scent of danger and ash in the air pulled him from his self-loathing more effectively than anything before it. He saw the warped, desiccated branches of uprooted bramble weed close to the road and wondered how a fire of that magnitude, fueled on the kindling of all the desert’s casualties, could simply disappear.

At once, it was as if a bomb exploded over the mountain. First the fire, something moving through the blast; that image, to the war-worn drivers, hit a nerve. He watched the wheels of cars too close for comfort skid, sending a spray of gravel in the air; he heard screams of panic through their aluminum protections. Then the fire was gone. Sephiroth hit faster and faster speeds until, a few minutes later, the reactor lit up the night sky. He heard the sound first, the tired whir as abandoned technology began its effortful encore. He saw the mako glow; his thoughts drifted to the possibility of Shinra’s return. Then, against cerulean light, he saw the silhouette of an enormous dragon. _Leviathan,_ he recognized. _How?_

The form of a woman was wrestling that dragon into the reactor’s core processor; he watched her sprint, leaping off its head as the reactor came down around her, fending off strikes as she twisted in the air, slicing debris. _She was going to fall hundreds of feet_ , he realized; this time, they were his wheels screeching against pavement.

Blasts of lightning the size of a skyscraper ripped the reactor apart. For a split second, he saw the dragon collapse. The sky went dark.

He drove with militant focus and absurd speed; by the time he and Vincent were in Nibelheim, searching the faces of shaken residents, a steady edge of refined aggression had returned to him that he had not felt in some time. It was not the quantum swell of rage that, since his return, had thrown him through the convolutions of memory and time; it was the steeled, predatory confidence he had before. It was where he had _lived_ , he remembered, _before_. His eyes passed a crowd of townsfolk yelling; behind them, he zeroed in on a flash of venetian blonde hair. Her face was streaked with dirt, her hair was wild.

She closed the distance in seconds. He felt the impact, an arm around his neck. She was sweat and heat and strength; then, she pulled away. He heard her say his name; her voice spoke wild warmth, animal passion fresh from the heat of battle. He heard Tifa call out, and she pulled away.

A drake was flying straight for him; Sephiroth moved to defend. She was already ready; she moved an instant faster, leaping in the air with her sword drawn. She leapt around the drake’s neck; leveraged to the ground. She brought her sword down; he heard the hum of a single frequency as her blade move through the air. It was over in a second. Her pupils flexed. Her eyes contained an almost tearful grief; at the same time, they rode resolute victory.

The tension broke; she had her arms around Tifa. Then Vincent, he stumbled backwards in shock. She looked at him. She looked relieved. Tifa stared at him a few moments, and nodded. “It wasn’t you,” was all she’d said. _It wasn’t him._

“I’d have done that,” he told Aesis quietly, later, when they were sat in the e’B’n’B’s living room. He’d made a fire; unnecessary on the first day of autumn, but vital to him, somehow. Tifa found a small piano; she played jazz chords defiant of their folk interpretation with hands that had learned to express the inarticulable. Aesis sang with her. The melodies they created soothed him; Aesis sang in her kimono, her legs straddling orthogonal edges of the piano bench, black viscose draped over her breasts, her top almost undone around her shoulders. He watched her chest rise and fall to the undulations of deep tones; she sang low in her belly after violence, and let sound rise up from her depths like tuned cries.

He heard the words:

_Mama thinks she spoilt me rotten, she blames herself, but papa he blesses me_

_It's a rough road to travel, mama let go now._

_It's always called for me._

His eyes shut on their own accord, he felt something he couldn’t explain, and looked at Vincent.

He wanted to talk to her now, but had little idea what to say. “I’d have done that” was the first thing to cross his mind.

“I know you would have. You didn’t have to.” Aesis looked at her drink. “This planet has people who’ve chosen to be its fighters. You know we couldn’t replace you. But you don’t have to.” He watched as she pressed her lips together; that soft expression. _Confidence_ , he thought. He recognized that confidence as similar to his own; it was often called arrogance, though it was far too grounded, too self-aware, for that. He recognized the sadness wound through it, as if it was inextricably bound with great mourning for her. _He had lost Genesis_ , he remembered. He wondered what her confidence cost her.

“What else would I be?”

She smiled. “Artist in residence?”

He caught his breath. He remembered a fantasy, suddenly: a dream he’d allowed himself to indulge on rare and discreet occasion. _He saw himself in an atelier, painting, listening to a recitation of Loveless; he could smell his cologne, that blend of ginger, orange blossom, and woody musk, mixed in the heady intoxication of linseed oil, he felt Genesis’ chest pressed firm against his naked back before he turned and—_ Sephiroth closed his eyes and shook the fantasy away. He had longed for that man, for years, as though trapped behind some stubborn sort of autistic silence that left him unable to do a thing but imagine. _Genesis had betrayed him_ , he remembered, watching the moon light up the bleak, heartbroken beauty of the Nibeli landscape.

“You say I could not be replaced, yet when we were walking this morning, you recoiled from the possibility of being a team. Didn’t you?”

“I was ambivalent,” came her reply. “All morning, you insisted I was average,” she smiled softly. “without any evidence that was the case. Like you were trying to tell me who I am. You must have felt such shame…” He voice broke as she thought of it, she collected herself. “…and it felt as if you were trying to make that shame mine instead. I’ve told you already I don’t want to know you that way. There is no mutuality in that, no possibility that I could be known.”

“—Is that really what you want? To be known?”

Aesis exhaled. “Isn’t that what anyone wants?”

“How could I possibly…” he shook his head. “I have never known people, I have never been… Those who best knew me betrayed me, abandoned me. The others, whole _cities_ used me as a weapon, a violent sacrifice to uphold their weakness. Their _innocence,_ ” He thought of Lucrecia; the word lashed out in a sneer, scorched in resentment. “You said you want to know me…” Thoughts raced through his mind, themes of culpability, themes of poisonous shame. “But I am not innocent, Aesis. I know you want that; you cannot have it. Jenova took away my choice, but there is a part of me, even now, that enjoyed killing them, that feels they deserved to burn for what their innocence _stole_ from me.”

He saw pain in her eyes, a peculiar sort of anger. Anger didn’t frighten him; he investigated hers. It stood without judgement _._ She said nothing.

“I tell you more in a single conversation than I say in years,” he shook his head and looked away. He couldn’t believe how easily those words had escaped him. “But there it is. Can you bear to know that?”

Her sad smile surprised him, he had prepared for… _departure. Attack. Tears, depending on how innocent she fancied herself. Something._ “Yes,” she replied calmly. “You judge with such caustic certainty. You are not the only person corrupted to preserve another’s innocence, definitely not the only person to enjoy redistributing that pain. There are so many on this planet.”

Sephiroth looked at her.

“It’s what happened in C-SOLDIER,” she continued. “I loved them, but they couldn’t accept what happened… it would have cost them their innocence, as you say.” _He d articulated something she’d never known how to express._ “The shame, the rage, they put it _all_ on me. I fought as hard as I could to save them that day, but they refused my help. They couldn’t accept that their ‘ _family’,_ ” she sneered into the word, “would murder them. So they died. Violently.” Sephiroth noticed the caustic condemnation flash in her eyes. His own narrowed in a soft smirk. “They died with their innocence intact and abandoned me to live with it; part of me wishes I could have been the one to kill them.” Her jaw clenched as she drank. “You are not as unknowable as you think.”

Her condemnation had faded, he saw. She looked sad; she looked guilty.

“But I acted,” he said softly.

“Yes,” she replied. “Would you have, without Jenova?”

The look in his eyes was edged with predation. Predation itself didn’t frighten her; she investigated his. It wasn’t a threat. “I don’t know.”

“You didn’t today.” _That was true._ Aesis looked away, squinting. “I think this is the first time it’s occurred to you that I want to be known, and here we are again. Talking about you.”

“Have you told the others that? What you just told me?”

Her jaw clenched. “No,” she admitted. “No. I never told anyone that. I can barely admit it to myself.”

“You can barely. I cannot escape it.”

Aesis clicked her tongue. “Back again!” She pulled away. “You have no compassion for it, for them or for yourself, do you? I think it traps you here, Sephiroth. It makes you selfish.”

“For what they took from me, yes, I am selfish,” he growled, speaking the words as though they were Lucrecia’s. “They made an abomination.” She recognized the challenge in his eyes.

“ _Or_ your own stubborn refusal to cultivate compassion leaves you collapsed in this…” she gestured with her hands, searching for a metaphor that could contain it, “this fucking gravitational singularity of shame, unable to understand yourself as anything else. They took the ineffable,” she said slowly, “but this monster thing is patriarchal, self-indulgent bullshit. Monstrosity is a choice, it is not an identity.” Sephiroth saw something undefeated in her as she rose to meet his test, saw slate pools pierced with green like trees cracking through concrete. “In your opinion,” he snapped.

“In my _experience_ ,” she countered, not kindly.

She shook her head. “So it’s not that you want to know me. You want me to absorb your worldview to absolve you of responsibility. You’re trying to tell me what my mind should be, not know it. _Again_.” She chuckled. “Gods, have you picked the wrong woman.”

 _It was profoundly unenjoyable to admit that she might be right; it was also likely the case._ He scoffed. “The choice is unbearable, Aesis.”

“I know it is.” She looked through heavy eyes, eyes tired in their own suffering; her calloused expression was unmistakable to him, as it would have been to any lifelong soldier. It was a command, an order to bear the unbearable. She wouldn’t articulate it, of course, lest she threaten her precious notion of choice, but he saw she _expected_ him to be capable of surpassing his limits; instinctively, he rose to meet the challenge. _How he could accept a command withheld in the vicissitudes of silence,_ he wondered, _but be unable to make an explicit choice?_

He had refused orders more than once, he remembered with surprise. He’d received one syllable of protest before Lazard had given his respectful agreement; his polite words and professional demeanor could not conceal the terror that stirred him at the prospect of pushing the issue. That was so common. Even his presence frightened them, so he stood on their borders; always at a distance, always looking away, lest he injure, lest he terrify. Their fear of him consumed them, ablated their opinions and their ethics, for those with a pretense to that sort of thing. In their acquiescence he slowly realized that the boy he’d been, the boy forced to fight, to endure tests, to endure humiliation… _that boy was gone, and in his place was a man no one would challenge._ He’d felt relieved. He’d felt so desperately alone. _He’d craved this_ , he realized. _He had pierced so much armor, he craved bouncing off a mind unbroken by fear._

“I have never experienced monstrosity as a _choice_.” he searched his thoughts, pulling to a new height of bravery. “I don’t know what this can be, how to know you, be known by you. But you are wrong,” his voice was raw. “I want to.” His stare addressed her with a muted sort of exasperation; he seemed to be at a loss. In a growl, he whispered, “If you want this to be my choice, then _give me one_. What do I do?” Tears cracked her bedrock; they did not fall. Warm words came, as hard as they were tender.

“You can ask me who I am, Sephiroth.”

He exhaled sharply: “Who are you?”

Her smile shocked him; her smiles were so habitually controlled, grounded in the weight of sadness, but this seemed to rise spontaneously, lifted through her face by something light. She was less a warrior in that moment, more something else entirely. “Mmm,” she curled up in her chair and looked away, as if to look at him was too much. “I didn’t actually have a follow-through for that.”

“Hm,” he chuckled. “How do you feel? Right now?”

She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth; he saw the corner of her mouth peek at him from behind her palm. “Happy.” He reached for her hand.

Aesis rested her fingers against his, meeting him halfway. “Sleepy,” she added. “It’s strange. I don’t usually feel like this after a single fight.” Sephiroth nodded. “I’m tired too,” he narrowed his eyes. _His body felt like he’d completed a mission, yet there had been none. They had walked, then found Madam M’s parlor, then...._ “Like spooky action at a distance,” he mused, watching her eyebrow arch. 

“Quantum theory. Particles so deeply linked,” he swallowed. “they can instantaneously influence each other, regardless of the distance between them.”

He could not quite name her expression.

“Do you like it?” he asked.

He watched her smile return; he could feel its spontaneity, its light, like a warmth in his chest. Her finger stroked his hand. She nodded and let her eyes close; her smile deepened.

“It’s beautiful.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! That's the end of Contrapasso. Up next: Aesis has a spicy dream and they continue the fight to take down Corneo. 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed! Drop kudos if you liked it!
> 
> EDIT: The next update may take longer, I've decided to do one more illustration for Contrapasso and I am an obsessive tortoise when it comes to drawing. Illustration first! EDIT AGAIN: <\-- Narrator: False


	9. Nibelheim Files, Episode 3: Fleurs de Nepenthe pt 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> TW: I've changed the rating of this story to Explicit to accommodate this chapter (and some future chapters). This one involves explicit, violent (consensual) sexual content, graphic violence, and references to various forms of betrayal and abuse, including Corneo and his proclivity for trafficking. As always, if you need a break from this kind of thing please act accordingly.  
> There's also Sephiroth/Genesis material discussed in retrospect. The more I watch those CC scenes... Oof. I just.
> 
> My plot-focused ambitions for this part stalled out in an effort to really explore what might follow that moment of connection for Sephiroth and my Also Very Damaged (TM) girl. There's a lot more coming, but in this part of Fleurs de Nepenthe, both Aesis and Sephiroth have a series of PTSD-ish dreams that confront them with their respective fears of intimacy and Aesis grapples with the cost of her violence. The chapter explores themes of sadism, betrayal, and enmeshment. As they begin to get their feet back on solid ground, Madam M shows up with a new mission: news of a girl, consumed by a monster of hatred, who escaped Corneo's men and needs their help.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd hoped to finish a painting before writing this, but I've also learned that my painting muse needs a damn nap and inspiration for this chapter came first. If I do finish it, I'll post it.
> 
> If you're looking for soundtrack material, I'd recommend IAMX's I Come with Knives for the beginning of this, if you're into the mess of it all. The song I reference in text is Jungle by Nina Chuba.

_Sephiroth’s face was an inch from her own._

_Training room 49, surrounded by a wall of fire, they fought somewhere on the razor edge. He pinned her forearm over her head with bruising fingers, her thighs gripped the firm points of his muscled hips. He drove his full weight forward; Aesis felt violence rip through her body as she maneuvered him. She had a vague sense they’d disarmed each other; now, without armor, without weapons, it was a ferocious brawl; bloody, bruised, it was a ground and pound._

_He threw an elbow, she twisted; felt the blow glance against her shoulder and cried out. She used the force to wrench her arm free, to pull him down. He slipped through her grasp with that superior, sadistic smirk; landed a punch with a wet, awful sound. On a growl, she kicked his head; the impact brought Sephiroth to his knees. Her fingers gripped his silken hair, raked pools of silver stained with their blood, wet with sweat, she pulled his head into her chest and felt a growl low in his throat on the skin of her ribs; his breath was fire against her breast, his teeth cut her skin. The sounds she made came from somewhere completely outside her control.  
_

_Aesis saw a beam fall, burning. Shinra tower was on fire, burning smoke like seared cloves in the air._

_She grabbed his hair and yanked; his teeth flashed, his hair tore in her hand. He looked at her, bloody, bared, the defiant rise of her chest as she gasped in air was a bold challenge; his palm pushed against the wounds on her breast, burning her with salt and the heat of brutal fingers. Their eyes locked. He brought his hand to his own lips and she saw her blood on his tongue before something inside her snapped. The kiss was immediate, ravenous; she could taste iron in his mouth, she bit into his lip. Sephiroth moaned in the pain as his weight pushed into her again, she wrapped around him. He lifted her head, pressed her hips down._

_It was then, when they saw the walls bucking in flame, that their hands moved to rip what was left of their clothing, when his bruising grip angled her hips and she guided him with shuddering breath, as each held desperately, ferociously, to the other, as the chaotic surges of their violence built deep in her body the aching rhythms of a voracious, sublime love._

_It was then, Aesis heard… hissing._

“Fuck!” She was wide awake, her fist hit wood. _Dream. She was dreaming._ She moaned internally, it was part horror, part… _fuck_. _Ifrit’s raging fuck all._

Hissing.

Tea kettle.

She was at the kitchen table. It was still dark out. _What unholy hour of the night—_

Behind her, Vincent switched the stovetop. “Bad dream?” Morning. _Very, very morning._ She’d fallen asleep in the kitchen, where Vincent, whose circadian rhythms were the stuff only an immortal being could maneuver, was making coffee. _Instant coffee,_ to rub salt in the wound. Aesis closed her eyes, mortified; she buried her face in her arms. Her words muffled in her sleeve: “Go away.”

Vincent placed a mug beside her. “I’d worried; surely returning to the Orphanage would be enough to provoke nightmares, memories from that time.”

“Uh. Yup. That is what that was… that was definitely a nightmare.” Aesis coughed, flushed. “Very… just… objectively fucked up, just… so bad.” Vincent watched her move with forced elegance to toss her curls over her shoulder; she cleared her throat and picked up her coffee in both hands. She left with stilted poise and an uneven step, muttering, “I have… to go… do… something.”

 _Subject Aesis is presenting with elevated pulse and increased respiratory rate;_ Medbot observed as she approached her room. _Is this a medical emergency?_

“Shut the fuck up,” she muttered.

She took a long shower, let hinoki cedar, ginger, and peppercorn, the seductive interplay between dancing notes of rose and shiso, transport her to a place that felt more centered, a place where she could breathe. Her hands grazed her wet skin, and even then, as her fingers climbed to the scars on her chest she felt a deep desire, a deep fear.

She remembered it, then, before she could choose not to. Her execution. The look in her comrade’s eye when she yelled out, their undiluted hatred of her, as if _she_ was the one there to kill them. Back then, when she fought insurgents and monsters at Shinra’s behest, she’d always held something back, something in her that felt too dangerous to engage, even on a battlefield. On that day, when she turned her rage toward her masters, she was all in.

Shinra held such fear of alterity, she thought. Such an atavistic terror of the _other:_ of Wutian rebels, of the revolution’s general, Barret Wallace; when they targeted him the warmth of his mahogany skin seemed his most egregious offense. Aesis rubbed the crimson bodywash over her heart. That day she had unleashed every ounce of rage, long suffocated in exile from the heart of humanity itself, every ounce of rage that she had choked down across decades of their hidden imprisonment, their hidden violence, their hidden rape. To call it a massacre was insufficient; it was the violence she imagined only a child raised by their killer could understand. _Shinra was afraid of the wrong people_ , she thought, moving to wash her hands; they should have saved their surest terror for what their hatred grew in the hearts of their daughters.

They assumed she’d sacrifice her dignity on an altar of their degradation to protect them.

Failing that, they assumed she’d die when they told her to.

She didn’t.

There was no room left in her for those fires, for that murderous love. She had barely survived it once, and in the end, it was her own violence that came closest to breaking her. The shame she felt after Junon had nearly cost her soul, and she could never do it again. Her head fell back against the tile. _No matter how incomprehensibly sexy..._ But that was the danger. The way that attraction could infect her, recalibrate every emotion, every perception, ever memory, to keep her from seeing it. The shame. The hateful, hateful rage. It had taken so long to reclaim herself from that, to rebuild herself in dignity; that process wasn’t over. It was still a struggle. She still fought to destroy, still fought to avenge; the hatred was always licking her heels.

_But last night, at the fireplace, he’d tried to know her, and she felt…_

It was too frightening for Aesis to allow the emotion a name.

He had not acted entitled to her, not then. _With Jenova, Sephiroth felt that entitlement_ , she knew. _Now, w_ _hat would happen when he was angry_? _Was there a reason to be afraid?_ The was the work, always, that ruthless teasing apart of past and present. Aesis was terrified she was missing something; she was terrified that, like her fallen comrades, she was refusing to see something in front of her face. That, perhaps, was the message of her dream. To remind her that after decades learning to love and to kill in the same breath, nothing was more dangerous, nothing more destabilizing, than what she was beginning to feel for Sephiroth. Fireside chats and stolen moments of sweetness were not worth the blindsiding horror of Junon.

 _How could she know if she was missing something? The memories were consuming her,_ Aesis realized, _she was lost in time_. _She would know nothing until she faced them._

She let the red on her chest run clean and walked away, eyes like she’d stepped on a battlefield.

* * *

Sephiroth rolled in his sleep.

_Trapped in the eternal pressures of the lifestream or no, insanity was an experience at the universe’s edge. Off the ground, only the cosmic inside of him, he was skinless, he was war riding swells of rage and hatred; he was a mind detached from the violent sensorium of a body, he was a violent sensorium, detached from a mind. She was the only organization, yet as he rescued and conquered her he felt a boundless power, power over her, that he thought signified his superiority. Relief. To destroy another was the only relief he knew. Had those been his thoughts? Had they been hers?_

_He silenced her and spoke in her voice._

_A passing observation, annihilated in ephemera almost as soon as it came: he could not see where she began, nor where he ended. He was the primordial beginnings of a man, undone; he felt distinctly and insanely as if he’d been forced into her poisoned womb, subjugated to a toxic gestation that left him abandoned to the far extremes of helplessness, soothed only by the absolute extremes of power, of predation. He was helpless to the violence he enacted, yet he felt mighty as its perpetrator. The fabric joining his thoughts disintegrated in her caustic brine, yet in the subjugation of his own mind he could corrupt and invade the minds of others. He was almost a God. Pure hatred, pure violence, enacted from a myopic tunnel, blind action in claustrophobic pressure. He attacked without memory, with every feeling, every thought, infected by her influence; only a delusion of independence, only a delusion of overcoming. The power was so very real; it was his, but then, it wasn’t. No victory on her terms would expel him from that amniotic psychosis._

_In the mind of another, a flicker of separation caught flame and burned within him. It was not even a word at first, but a feeling that collapsed into ether and reappeared, dodging in and out of his awareness. Something was wrong, that feeling said. It didn’t have to be that way. He felt it first as he wrapped himself in Cloud’s memories._

_As Cloud fought to resist Jenova’s cells, his victory showed Sephiroth an overcoming unlike any conquest he’d imagined. What followed was a parasitic sort of revolution, a fetal rebellion, immoral and desperate and breathtaking in its power; it was effective. He ran from a mind that craved him, that would devour and trap him, to invade a mind that loathed him, that would expel and renounce him. Only then, he understood. When Cloud rejected him, he understood how to reject Jenova. Humanity, he sneered at the prospect. Yet he stepped into it and out of her as if to his death._

Sephiroth opened his eyes, balling a fist with his arm poised to strike as he jumped out of his nightmare and back into his room. Sunrise was breaking through night sky. He was terrified for a moment, then ferocious the next, ready for a battle with the shadows of a vanity. He wanted to vomit. He wanted to crawl out of his skin. 

_There is no hate, only joy, for you are beloved by the goddess,_ he remembered Genesis’ voice with a groan. _Hero of the dawn, healer of worlds. Sephiroth, the other man called to him. Hearing his name on Genesis’ lips sent a sort of electric shock to his diaphragm, it stilled him. If you are hero of the dawn, does that make you beloved? Sephiroth had no idea how to respond. A crack in cement tile seemed to speak louder than any articulable thought._

 _Genesis smirked. The man made theater of the things he felt most truly, Sephiroth realized, as if at some point of his life Genesis had been so abandoned he could only reveal the truth of his heart through a performance of it. He saw the loneliness the smoke and mirrors condemned him to, a loneliness that wrapped around his own with an almost physical sensation of contact. The tension between cultivated unreality and raw passion in that man transfixed him, left him longing, always, for his depths. For something deeper. Something just out of reach._

Energy coalesced with a crack in his chest.

_Are you a loveless hero, Sephiroth? Genesis spoke slowly. Taunting. Almost sincere. Perhaps both._

_Not if you love me._

_He didn’t say it aloud; his expression revealed nothing but intensity. Genesis was so close he could smell him, worn spice and musk. He looked in his eyes and felt a pit in his stomach; azure seemed to pierce through him to something else entirely, to his image on a recruitment poster, perhaps. To the president’s fingers on his chest, fastening a medal of valor in an achingly dishonest and arbitrary media circus, to accolades spoken by the public masks of devils, teeth sharpened on the bones of the brave and the soulful, bleached in bourgeois politesse. A common story._

_If we were to enact it, would you be the hero, or would I?_

_Sephiroth turned, his heart breaking._

_He wanted those eyes to recognize what their souls might share – had they? Did they? He wanted to escape with Genesis to a world released of hatred, of conquest and pretense. Stop, Sephiroth wanted to demand, plea, ask. Leave these shallow waters and their bleached, lifeless ecosystems. Swim with me in the deep, let these trappings drown. It’s all yours, was what he said instead. It's all yours. The pain undid him._

_He left for Nibelheim hoping that Genesis might meet him in the depths, might love him in the depths. He would have sacrificed his confabulated heroism, he knew, abandoned Shinra, without another thought; it hadn’t mattered. Genesis did not love him. He would consume his body, devour his fame, but he would not love him. He felt his hope die, killed by the hateful envy in his friend’s eyes, by cruel words escaping the cold smirk on his lips. There was nothing deeper._

_Like a flash, he saw Jenova’s face; he felt the pressure of her poisoned promise build again. To be cherished by someone. To be a part of someone._

Sephiroth reached under his head and threw his pillow; he pushed himself out of bed and headed for the bathroom.

* * *

He heard music down the hall, a growl.

 _And I really want to say it to your face, but I don’t know which one to talk to,_ a woman sang over the din with unaffected cool. _Scared of everybody in the place, ‘cause they got a million ways they could bite you._

_They cut their teeth in the jungle._

Aesis. He heard a slew of insults crude enough to make a pilot blush. The sound of an ugly smack brought tension to his stomach; something hit concrete.

_I’ve been there, I’ve seen it_

_They do cut-throat things down in the jungle, they eat all the humble._

_I’ve been there, I’ve joined in, in the dance of oblivion._

Tifa stood outside the door to the dojo, arms crossed over her chest, watching him approach. She was guarding the door, staring him down with unimpressed eyes. “Nice hair,” she grumbled, clearly exhausted.

“I—” Sephiroth reached absently for his ear, in the direction of strands he’d hastily chopped just past his shoulders. “It felt…”

She lifted a finger and pressed it to her lips. “She’s been in there for an hour.” A loud crack signified some change in pace, followed by a barrage of blows. Wrapped hands cracking leather, he recognized the sound. Tifa made a face. “Did something happen last night?”

Sephiroth swallowed. He was about to say nothing had; he meant that nothing violent had happened, nothing ostensibly bad. He reconsidered. That tender moment at the fireplace, her fingers finding his hand, the warmth of that sweet smile that seemed to breathe into her of its own accord… _Had that upset her? Had it upset him? Could something so gentle have triggered those psychotic nightmares of Jenova’s control, those memories of Genesis’ betrayal? Surges of rage, heartbroken longing, violation and violence like a storm in him?_ _Did it sweep her up, too?_ Tifa looked at him, withholding; he saw her eyes roll in irritation as she gave into the urge to offer him clarity. “Sometimes when Ae feels close to other people, she freaks out. She has a whole process.” Her voice was a bit deadpan, as if she’d been there before.

_Was he doing the same? Freaking out?_

He remembered his words to Vincent in Lucrecia’s cave: _It would be easier to have nothing than to have this._ Her touch, her warmth, had given him a terrifying glimpse of what he’d once longed for, and the result was chaos. _N_ _othing could be more painful than a little of what he so deeply craved in full._ A taste of those elusive depths, a stolen moment of connection after a lifetime inured to a wasteland. It was excruciating.

“Uh,” Tifa was trying to talk to him, he realized, too late to respond. “Looks like you two have that endearing quality in common,” Tifa rolled her eyes toward the sound of a particularly motivated punch. “You didn’t ask for my advice, but I’m not interested in watching you lose your shit any more than you already clearly have.” She gestured with an unimpressed expression at his hair. “Just give her time. She needs to figure out where she is,” Tifa elaborated. “She knows where she is, intellectually, but emotionally… she’s in Junon right now.”

Sephiroth nodded.

_He was in the reactor._

“Tifa,” he began, suddenly eager to change the subject. “I never told you I’m sorry.”

“You haven’t,” she replied tersely. “And don’t. You didn’t do it again. That’s all that matters to me.” He nodded. An awkward pause followed. Tifa filled the silence. “I can’t hate you for letting Jenova in, and I can’t technically blame you for what you did afterward, but I am not your friend.”

“Aesis said that there could be a place for me here, if I chose to fight,” Sephiroth replied. “Do you feel the same? I can’t ask—”

“No, you can’t. She can.” Tifa jumped at the sound of a bag slamming into concrete and glared at the dojo door. “It surrenders!” she yelled through the closed door. “Merde!” Aesis shouted back. A Wutian dialect. _Fuck off._ Sephiroth smiled slightly.

“She’s speaking Wutian, she's almost done,” Tifa sighed with relief and looked at him. “Ae walked through hell for me. She can ask, and she did. If you want to stay, I’ll fight with you.” She shook her head, suddenly looking down. Sephiroth could see her mustering her courage and felt a stab of shame. “The things you did destroyed my dreams, you left a pain in me that shattered the foundation of who I was, that changed the course of my life forever. There’s no way over that for me.” He looked away, his breath caught. “That was Jenova, right? But it was in you too. That rage, that sadism. It _is_ in you.” He closed his eyes, wincing; he gave the faintest nod. “So is this about redemption?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe we have that in common.” She firmly added, “But you don’t get to take anything else from me, Sephiroth. I’m not here to heal you, I’m not here to be chewed up so you can become a better man. I won’t even give you my leftover fries, do you understand? You fight for me, now. For my healing. For my future. For my dreams.”

He nodded.

“I understand,” he said simply, listening to an orchestra of punches weaving in drums. 

Tifa nodded slowly, and walked away.

 _I’m coming off savage,_ the music interjected.

_I want to live, I made it a habit._

* * *

By the time Madam M joined them in the kitchen, Aesis felt more herself. She arrived first, wrapped in her kimono top, skin flushed from full-contact emotional processing. She was still afraid, but his sincerity the night before, his earnest desire to know her mind, had convinced her to stand in her fear a bit longer. Sunlight caressed the edge of stove; its warmth blended in the curve of a flame boiling water for the next round of coffee. Vincent had converted to a French press; in any other context, Aesis would have been relieved.

Sephiroth stood with his back to her. She watched cashmere cling to the tapered edge of his shoulder as he stirred his drink; even casually, his movements were lithe, supple in their strength. The smell of a dark roast, an espresso blend, lingered in the air, brushing her with bold undercurrents of caramel and spiced rum. She glimpsed the line of his lips as his profile caught sunlight; he turned to face her and tension rooted in her stomach. Their gaze met.

“How are you?” He asked her. The question struck her; it was the first time he’d ever asked, the question volleyed out before she had the opportunity to react to his hair. His sincerity was touching. Normally, Sephiroth negotiated social interaction like a person who'd long studied a game foreign to him, he played it with a deadened, but able, bookishness. Now, in his words, she felt an awkward earnestness, she felt something alive. Aesis smiled; her untempered joy at his question jarred her, again. She hadn’t smiled like this in… _had she ever_? She wondered.

She felt the fear again, and named it: _Junon._ _Stay with me, Ae,_ she counseled herself. _This matters. He matters. Wait until you know what’s real._

“Hungry,” she replied smoothly, bringing a piece of fruit to her lips as she studied him. “You cut your hair.”

His hand crossed his chest, resting over his clavicle at the crook of his neck. “It was too heavy,” he replied, watching her with a degree of suspicion. Aesis inhaled, realizing that in his sincerity, he would likely be confused, made vulnerable, by her evasive answer. She took a step closer and summoned her courage. “I’m unsettled,” she replied honestly. “How are you?”

“The same.” He looked relieved.

Aesis heard a woman clear her throat, a guttural sound imbued with a haughty elegance. “Mimi,” she turned slowly to greet Madam M at the door. “Something tells me I haven’t had enough coffee yet.”

“Drink up, then.” Madam M smiled coyly. “I have news.”

Aesis poured her cup and turned on the oven; she heard the switch click a few extra times as unlit gas built around the burner. It caught flame with a barely noticeably explosion; Aesis dialed down the heat. “I’m listening.”

“Corneo received word of mercenaries in town, apparently some of his men went missing last night. He doesn’t know we’re working together, so he'll spend a few days trying to flush out phantom enemies,” Madam M smiled. “It will buy our stand-off some time. In the meantime, something came through that I believe will require your unique gifts.”

The smell of espresso in the air turned bitter as Madam M told them about a child who survived one of Corneo’s parties: “Rumor has that she bitten by one of these monsters; she escaped into the forest. They’re saying she’s been infected.”

Tifa, whose face had already been scrunched in discomfort, looked particularly disgusted. “What do you mean, infected?”

“His goons went to one of their stash houses last night, after they smoked themselves out of the reactor. The girl was… they were going to feed her to this beast, but something went wrong. When they got there the girl was gone and their men…” Madam M shook her head.

Aesis’ eyes narrowed, she stepped closer. “She killed them?”

“That word is not a fair description of what she did to them.”

The grey in the ex-SOLDIER's eyes flashed cold. “How many?”

Madam M smirked. “Unclear. They had some trouble… putting the pieces back together.” She shook her head, shooting a determined glare at the wall behind Aesis’ head. There was guilt in her expression, barely concealed under her habitual patina of slink. “This girl is small, only eight, nine years old. But this infection… I've been intercepting the Goons' communication, and they’re describing some.. moving mass, some monster appendage, attached to her, they're saying it made her incredibly strong. It made her feral, vicious to the extreme. They’re calling it a ‘demon of hatred’.”

Aesis sneered. “I guess it takes one to know one.”

“It got her out alive, but she’ll die in the desert if no one can stop this monster from consuming her. She will kill, and she will die. ”

The look in Aesis’ eyes was a tired sort of smolder; she looked away. The anger was personal.

“You want me to fight a demon of hatred?” Aesis shook her head, smirking bitterly. _There were times when she would have felt confident against such a foe, perhaps foolishly so. With Sephiroth so close, after feeling that... Now was not one of those times._ “Mimi, that is the one fight I don’t know if I can win; there are fighters out there better suited to that battle than me.”

“Yes, but you're here. Besides, I want you to help a girl who's at risk of becoming a monster,” Madam M replied with a soft smile. “And I think you are precisely the woman for that job.”

Aesis sighed and looked at the others. They nodded. Aesis pressed her lips together; she noticed, to her shock, that she was fighting back a tear. “Alright then,” she spoke evenly. “We’ll try.”


	10. Nibelheim Files, Episode 3: Fleurs de Nepenthe pt 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> TW: graphic depictions of violence, child abuse and neglect, imprisonment, references to trafficking, traumatic themes. As always, if you could use a break from that sort of thing, then do you, queen.
> 
> In this part of Fleurs de Nepenthe, Sephiroth and Aesis try to negotiate what they're beginning to feel for each other. The gang search for the girl who escaped Corneo's Goons, and an unforeseen (and unfortunate) series of events sends Sephiroth and Aesis back in time to confront the depths of their hatred. I really wanted to focus this chapter on the idea of connection, how destructive abusive connections are to the human spirit, and how connection can still allow these characters to confront the level of violence they endure and stay human.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Recap: In the first part of Fleurs de Nepenthe, both Aesis and Sephiroth had PTSD-ish dreams that confronted them with their respective fears of intimacy. Madam M showed up with a new mission: news of a girl, consumed by a monster of hatred, who escaped Corneo's men and needs their help.
> 
> Here Nepenthe is a dual reference: It refers to a fictional, ancient potion that "induces forgetfulness of pain and sorrow", and to Nepenthes, which is the Latin name for a genus of carnivorous plants.
> 
> For soundtrack material, I'd recommend "Become the Beast" by Karliene, for that girl in the desert. The song in-text is The Rose, by Bette Midler.

“Did you love him?” She asked gently, a small shadow crossing her eyes that he wanted to think was jealousy. Around it, he saw pain. She was hurting for him. _Perhaps,_ Sephiroth wondered, _the wound was easier to see than he thought._ _Had Genesis seen it?_

They were walking through the Nibeli forest, desert terrain subdued in overcast skies, a low fog rolling across their feet. They’d been scouting for hours, looking for tracks around bramble weeds that moved like glaciers in the mist. The conversation turned to Genesis.

 _Did you love him?_ He could barely admit it.

“Yes,” Sephiroth confessed. He did not tell her, but it was the first time he said aloud what he had felt for his friend; it was the first time he acknowledged what he’d felt for another man. A weight lifted, with it came a harrowing sense of foreshadowing; he braced in preemptive shame for her reaction, for her repulsion. On an exhale, his breath shook.

She smiled with a sort of sadness that made him wonder if she was disgusted; when he realized she wasn’t, he wasn’t sure what she was feeling. 

She said after a moment, “He’s in you.’ When met with his sharp reception, she clarified, “When you talk about him, your voice, your body, you change. I’ve seen your posture hold steady through the most excruciating pain, Sephiroth, but now, you shift. He must have meant so much to you.”

Sephiroth jerked back into something more resolutely stiff, something more hidden. “He did,” he said finally. He had told her the broad strokes, the skeleton of the story. So many details of the man, he omitted: _his passion, his elegance, the cutting edge of his charisma… his soft, hidden sadness, the wounds that tossed beneath his surface like ravenous sharks circling for a twilight meal, the pure beauty that overtook him when he glimpsed the wonder that relieved his pain. Genesis’ lost heart._ He said nothing of those things, he saved them for himself. He spoke instead of the way Genesis hid himself in performance, of his envy, of his cruelty. He wondered if he concealed Genesis to Aesis in the same way Genesis had concealed himself; he had never been known in any other way, by anyone. _Lost in mirrors,_ Sephiroth wondered if Genesis had ever known himself. _They might have shared that,_ he realized, _and that, above all, he would keep for himself._

Aesis’ visible irritation sounded on an exhale, she looked away. “It’s his loss,” she said finally.

“Have you loved like that?” He asked.

“Yes,” she answered. “In the Orphanage.” She didn’t elaborate at first, and when she spoke again, he braced. He watched her breath catch, her spine reflexively straighten to stop her chest from pulling forward. He watched her body move instinctively in the memory of another, and he felt hatred stir in his sadness. She held his gaze. Aesis said blandly, “It didn’t work out.”

“Did he survive?”

A soft, sad smile traced her lips. “No one did,” she looked at him, slit pupils dilating; their pulsing dance meant something he couldn’t decipher and he wondered if she was hiding something. “Except you.”

“I wasn’t there.”

“Hm. You were always there. You were the yardstick by which every accomplishment was measured, you were the standard by which every fight was lost or won. There was a time when I truly believed I’d be forced to become you, or be killed. We lived under your shadow with the highest stakes.”

Sephiroth shook his head, looking away on an exasperated exhale. “I did not want that,” he said finally. “I didn’t want any of that.”

“Unlike Genesis,” Aesis lifted an eyebrow. He jolted. _That was true. Genesis had made his own copies. It was a difference between them that did not sit well with him._ “I admire that in you," she added. After an awkward pause, she continued, "They tried to tell us that you were…” she gestured vaguely at him, “Just like that, naturally. I didn’t believe it, with the experiments that made us, I thought they must have done something like that to you. You were almost a tangible presence, a comrade,” She chuckled, the sort of incongruous laughter that only made sense in a war-worn context. “They even made me fight you, once. In the Com Sim,” she watched his sharpening expression. “Well, not you, obviously. Your… ghost in the machine.”

“You didn’t tell me that.” His tone had the soft dejection she’d learned indicated a deeper hurt in him. She replied softly, “I know I didn’t. It was an information advantage in the mansion, then it was awkward. I’m sorry.” Sephiroth frowned. _This felt familiar_ , but he couldn’t remember why.

“Do you do that often? Conceal what you know? Conceal your power?”

Aesis offered a bittersweet smile in non-response and bent down, plucking a folded purple blossom off of the desert floor. Fog weaved through her fingers; for a moment, it gave the illusion the flower had come from it.

“A _fleur-de-nepenthe_. They’re clever plants,” she smiled sadly, ostensibly changing the subject. “They’ve evolved to grow in this depleted soil; they thrive in wastelands where nothing else can live. They’re carnivorous.” her finger brushed the blossom’s spines. The smile in her eyes told him she was answering in metaphor; _she was still hidden_ , he thought, _yet she was making herself more bare for it_. _So close, yet withheld. It was maddening._ “The danger is obvious, but they still drown.” Sephiroth could see a pool behind the flower’s ridges, he could make out the form of a dead fly, digested in its liquid. She smiled. “People react to these plants in such bizarre ways. Some think they’re a flower, so they give them fertilized soil. They can’t digest its nutrients, and it poisons them. Others think they’re a weed, and they burn them.”

Sephiroth considered her tangent with building irritation. He wanted her to stop hiding, he was sick of reaching for another person through the mask of metaphor only to brush air.

“You conceal yourself to prevent horticultural error?”

“Hah,” Aesis looked away, he watched her curls fall off her face as she turned back to him. “I was in a wasteland, Sephiroth. I learned how to eat bugs.”

He felt something feral curl deep in him and smiled, a faint curl of his lip. Sephiroth looked away. _It irritated him, but those metaphors pierced him._ “When we fought? Was I a fly?”

Aesis smirked and shook her head at him, eyes widening at the memory. “You know damn well you were a lion.”

His smile deepened. He asked her what happened.

She told him the broad strokes: that Hojo had forced her to fight him, in front of the seconds and thirds, not as a demonstration but as a punishment. There were any number of scores he might have sought to settle, any number of times she’d bruised his ego; it was intended as humiliation.

Sephiroth was skeptical; Hojo had always been less involved with training and more interested in the science of their performance. Aesis nodded, agreeing that he might have been testing something; whatever it was, she said, it involved humiliation. At that, Sephiroth chuckled.

“Sadism veiled as scientific inquiry.”

“His expertise.”

The fight itself was not humiliating; it was too brutal, however, to sit comfortably with the cadets it was meant to entertain. They did talk about it afterward: she had managed to disarm him. She was not physically stronger, or a better swordsperson, but nevertheless. When Hojo called time, their weapons were discarded and the Com Sim had become a furnace, a pillar of fire surrounding a full-contact brawl. She looked away when she mentioned that part of things, her cheeks flushed.

“It snapped something in me,” she said after a beat. “After he stopped the simulation I attacked Hojo, in front of all of them. He was the one humiliated that day. The next,” her eyes dulled, “We were in Junon.”

“That’s why they ordered the execution.”

“We were judged too powerful, and too unstable. Hojo’s ego was the glass ceiling.”

His jaw clenched, intensity lighting up his narrowing gaze as his heart hurt and his ego chaffed. Then he sighed, and looked away.

“I was expecting disbelief,” she mused. “At least a call for a rematch.”

“You would have it,” he replied on an edge. “But I find it… difficult to feel that sort of pride right now. How,” he growled, “did you hide yourself from me, to manage that?”

She sighed in frustration. “Just because you don’t see my power, it doesn’t mean I’m hiding it. It… This is a different business for women, Sephiroth. When I fight men especially, they see weakness in me. When they realize that I’m powerful, they feel manipulated, tricked, even when I’m not doing a single goddamn thing. It's because the weakness they see is not mine: they see their own weakness in me. It's a projection. It is a more reliable portrait of their vulnerability than anything I’d get from a dossier,” She shook her head, getting angrier. “That, I use, sometimes ruthlessly. But the idea that _I am_ hiding predicates on the assumption that _I am,_ and _I_ don’t exist to them. I could strip naked and tap dance on their head and it wouldn’t make a difference. They see themselves.”

“They use you as one might… a punching bag, then.” He frowned. “A simulacrum of what they hate, one that they can attack, beat. You must hate them for that." The specifics of the experience felt foreign to him, yet he felt its beating heart in his bones. He had endured something similar, as much as he knew he had perpetrated the same.

“I do,” she replied.

“So you trap them in their own projections.”

“Yes, exactly. I can _feel_ their weakness, and they can't see it. I fight them on a map of their own soul, and they run circles in the dark.”

“Hm,” Sephiroth’s eyes narrowed. She could see a certain recognition in them, a certain admiration, thought he kept it quiet. “So what did you _feel_ of my soul?”

“Desolation,” she replied immediately. “I felt a connection to you, but from the moment you appeared in that field I felt so viscerally that in you, there was no one.” He winced. “You began that fight like a war machine; it took me a moment to realize it wasn’t an artifact of the simulation.” She paused. “You were alone the whole time, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” he replied tersely. “Until I met Genesis and Angeal, yes, completely. Even then…” For a moment, he looked as if he would not continue. “They never told me about C-SOLDIER,” he said finally. “I thought that I was fundamentally different from anyone, that I was… special. And as a corollary, yes, that I was alone in the world.”

“Loneliness and superiority in such extremes,” she smiled. “No wonder you’re so judgmental. You aren't as alone as you think you are. In that fight, Sephiroth, you were special. But it wasn’t a trick. So was I.” There was a growl in her voice, he could her that her statement was a reclamation of identity. It threatened him, it enticed him. She closed her eyes in the memory. “It was as if you were fighting me from a thousand miles away. You did underestimate me,” she frowned. “But then something changed. I’ve replayed that fight a thousand times in my mind,” for an instant, she blushed, “and I don’t know what happened. That was when I—”

“You could not have disarmed me,” he interrupted with a sudden and absolute confidence.

“Mm,” Aesis chuckled. “Everyone loses a fight eventually.”

“Not me, not like that. Unless… Hm.” Sephiroth paused, he felt some of his old pride return. His lip curled in a smirk. “You wonder how I saw you, I think I know. Should I conceal it?”

Aesis rolled the _fleur-de-nepenthe_ between her fingers. “That’s teasing.”

Sephiroth looked at her for a moment, his expression inscrutable, his eyes shining. “That’s vengeance.”

“You’re brutal.”

He smiled.

“You said it yourself, my sword gives me distance.” he pressed his lips together. “I think when I saw your power, your… eyes, I must have recognized someone cut from the fabric of my own soul, someone…” the words escaped him before he could stop them. _Now, of all times,_ he thought, _the floodgate of his selective mutism lifted._ “I may have wanted to close that distance,” he finished, stifled, his tone suddenly as dry as if he were reading a field report.

“Maybe you did see me,” Aesis exhaled sharply. He couldn’t quite place her expression, and noticed a catch in her breath before she continued, “It worked. The fight moved to fists.”

“Exactly,” he breathed. “Contact. I…” _I wanted to touch you._ He didn’t say it. “I suppose I’m to receive a lecture on the use of violence to achieve that proximity.”

“Oh absolutely. I have a speech prepared,” Her eyes twinkled. “I say _fuck_ a lot.”

Sephiroth laughed, a sudden, sharp sound. Aesis reached forward, letting her fingers run the length of his pauldron, tracing jagged peaks that sloped toward his heart. He stopped. She slipped the flower’s stem in a leather loop.

“There. All the life of a flower, grown in desolate earth. It suits you.”

“Carnivorous,” he spoke low, his voice dark with judgment.

She smiled. “Imagine if life ever returned to this dead ground. Satiation, water…” Her fingertip still rested on his armor, cold steel over a beating heart. “A _fleur de nepenthe_ would have no idea how to survive in soil that keeps most flowers alive. It would need to evolve again.”

“How could it?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “It would need time to make sense of it, I think.” When she lifted her eyes to meet his, she let the veil fall; she was exposed.

“Would you need time?” he whispered, cutting away what remained of her metaphor.

Aesis nodded slightly, tensed. She was afraid, he realized, of his effort to see her unfiltered. “Wouldn’t you?” She asked, brushing a strand of shorn hair away from the flower’s ridges.

He felt his whole body respond; within that, fear clutched his chest in a vice.

“I would,” he breathed. “Aesis,” he spoke firmly, “I want to see you, but you speak in metaphor. I feel it but I cannot _know_ it. Are you afraid?”

She looked at him, suddenly near tears.

“Ae! Sephiroth!” They heard Tifa call out. “I found something!”

* * *

Tifa stared, eyes fixed on a morbid tableau, her jaw slack. It was almost surreal.

“…How?”

Aesis nodded slowly as she took in the same scene, her expression deadened. “Well, after what she did to those Goons, what did you think she’d do with woodland creatures? Frolick?”

“I—” Tifa stared. “Even if Corneo’s men… Did what they did, she didn’t have to…”

“We saw this in Project C,” Aesis knelt to see if the blood at her feet was still warm. “Animals would go missing from the labs; they’d find them like this. This is human hatred,” she murmured. “At its most desolate. It’s like this monster feeds off it.”

“It’s unbelievable. It’s inhuman, it’s monstrous—”

“—Tifa,” Aesis interrupted in a hard, steady tone, “I love you, I need you to stop. She’s an eight year-old who was thrown away in circumstances you can’t even speak aloud. She was sold, almost murdered for entertainment. She’s alive because a monster that feeds off of this violence hitched a ride on her without her consent. I will listen to you judge her when you tell me how you’d handle that.”

“I—” Tifa could think of nothing; the challenge pushed her imagination past its breaking point, to a place of nothing, a place she could not bear to go.

“Aesis, what she did is pure wrong.”

“No argument there,” Aesis winced as the fog pulled back to reveal more bloodshed, standing as she heard a twig snap in the distance. “But she’s human. And she’s hurt.”

“If this is what it means to be human…” Tifa shook her head. She had tears in her eyes, she was shaking her head. 

“There’s more to humanity than this,” her friend murmured as she moved toward the sound. “We know that, Tif. But if we can’t find her, if she’s just alone…” Aesis made eye contact with Sephiroth and saw the pain, the horrible recognition in his eyes. “She’ll lose all of it,” he finished her sentence, taking in the carnage.

Tifa looked at them both, and nodded.

In that moment, they heard a giggle, the sound of a child’s laughter painted in maniacal strokes. In a crack, everything went dark; Tifa was paralyzed, frozen and staring. She felt like she was watching strobe lights in shadow as freeze frames of a fight unfolded before her.

A girl, screaming; her eyes red, maniacal.

Teeth, gnashing.

Aesis, reaching; her sword cut through the beast and more teeth came down, teeth multiplying in a fractal that cracked apart her foundations in terror.

The girl lunged at Aesis, the monster turned on her, furious, insane, devouring.

Teeth cut into Aesis’ arm as she leapt in front of that girl, and a millisecond later,

Sephiroth.

Then the shadow was gone. Tifa felt Vincent’s arm wrap around her but she kept her gaze on that little girl, on Sephiroth, on her friend. The world was silent, faintly ringing, color dulled in sepia tones. The girl lay propped against Sephiroth's still arm, her face covered by rolling fog. Aesis jerked; as if moving on its own accord, her hand reached and grabbed leather over Sephiroth’s chest. Complete silence descending on Tifa and Vincent as they slowly found their feet.

The others stayed down, unconscious on the desert floor.

* * *

White light seared Sephiroth’s eyelids. Fire stabbed at the back of his skull, his heart dropped into his chest with a nauseating jolt. Every muscle in his face pulled taught like the turning gears of an elaborate lock. His hand moved to his brow. He steeled.

_His hand was different. Softer. Smaller._

Sephiroth’s eyes snapped open and closed again, barely able to keep pace with the swells of urgency that rose in him, unable to give shape to the intensity. A bare hand held his field of vision, in and out of focus, backlit to agonizing contrast. He wondered if a finger would move. It did. _Smaller fingers, the fingers of a boy._

“Are you sure?” He heard the words in an echo around him in the swirling abstraction of florescent lights. _Burning lights_. “How is it possible? They haven’t been able to successfully clone—”

“What else could he be? His DNA is a complete match. Hojo must have figured it out.”

“Which one was he?”

“Who cares, I’m sure Hojo knows. I reassigned his specimen classifier. Sevensie. Send him back down.” _What?_

“If he had a name—”

“—They don’t have names. Do your job.”

 _No. No. No._ Two eyes came to focus in the glare of a mirror on the wall, slit pupils so constricted in fear that his eyes looked almost dead. _His eyes._ Suddenly they were red, a menacing red glare staring down at him, a foreign monstrosity in his own reflection. The mirror cracked and Sephiroth jumped. Glass fell to the floor; he heard the girl’s cruel laughter in the air and stifled the urge to seize a weapon. _The monster._ His last memory was a searing pain in his back; it must have knocked him into a fever dream, or a schism in time. _No._ His body was younger, less conditioned to the fear. His mind commanded a steeled posture he didn’t yet know how to provide. He shuddered at a familiar smell; the lemon-lime detergent of his starched uniform. _Shinra’s labs_ , he thought. _If it was a nightmare, it was the most vividly real he’d every had._ The pit of his stomach dropped, stealing what little breath remained in his lungs. _Sevensie. Seven-C. Shinra._

_C-SOLDIER._

_This wasn’t his nightmare._

“Put him with One,” he heard. _Lab techs_. The voiced faded out, then came back: “she’ll be gone soon anyway.”

It took him until he reached the dungeons, marched by militarized guards, to understand where he was. He was in the Orphanage. _The Tombs._ He was escorted through them, no doubt by design; it was clearly meant to intimidate him. What had been a stale, decrepit dungeon, an abandoned relic, was suddenly alive. Where dimmed green safety lights had once lit cobwebs and rusted medical debris like a diseased bioluminescence, bright fluorescent ceilings now burned his eyes, left that familiar, dull ache in his temples. The cells were full. He smelled death; he saw writhing bodies and reflexively scattered their faces in his mind, shifting the pain in their eyes just out of his focus; he did not want to face the abominations of Hojo’s experiments, he did not want to see them mutated, dying. _Monstrous._

In the panic and upheaval of the moment, it occurred again to Sephiroth that these were the experiments that formed C-SOLDIER, and he focused when he saw blonde curls. A small girl, a teenager, had been propped upright in a cell a few doors down from the cage Aesis had dragged him into. Her body was shaking, but her face was expressionless; he looked closer. Her eyes looked thoughtful, tears had streaked dirt dried in clots across her face; he saw another tear fall, though the girl didn’t seem to notice. She was crying silently, her body was shaking, but she didn’t seem aware of any pain. She looked at him dully, then through him.. _Her cheekbones, the shape of her face, were familiar… but her eyes were normal._ Large grey eyes, no iridescent green, no slit pupil staring back at him in a thunderclap of recognition. He wasn’t sure if it was her.

Next to her, a clock seemed to melt down the wall; its hands blended together, trapped in an amalgamation of six and eight. _Seven was missing,_ he noticed, suddenly paranoid. _Did that mean something?_

He pushed the judgement, the reflexive disgust, away enough to let himself consider the eyes of those around her. One on the ground, small, his skin an off shade of grey; they were checking his nonresponsive pupils, slit pupils frozen, preserved in reaction to a sight now lost to time. At the far end, he saw two more, a boy with thick black hair whose knee was being swabbed with disinfectant; the boy stared at him with a curious challenge through feline eyes, eyes like his own. In this room, he realized, tossed in the contortions of pain, trapped in degrading and shaking bodies, there were many eyes like his. He looked over his shoulder toward the boy with black hair; Sephiroth jumped as his face changed. Lime irises flashed red, demonic in the glee of sudden sadism; the air rushed in his ears and the room flashed red. Sephiroth heard an electric crack; an unused ventilator short-circuited and caught flame next to the black-haired boy. The boy jumped, eyes wide; the red glare was gone. Sephiroth heard techs yelling as they rushed to the ventilator. He saw the clock near that girl’s head was in one piece, ticking as if nothing had happened.

 _The monster. He didn't know how to fight it, he didn't know what was happening. Best to go along,_ he thought, _until he knew what to do._

His curiosity, the gravitational pull to a sense of familiarity that seemed to capture him in that place, those things he did not consider as motivations.

They walked through a narrow pathway into a large arena lined with cages. He looked away from the bodies of children, some moving, some not, that filled those cages and focused instead on a weed poking through a crack in the cement walkway. He watched the thick, reinforced soles of the guard’s boot crush its leaves as it passed underfoot. When he looked up, a girl with green eyes and slit pupils pulled him out of his reverie.

“Seven, is that you?” The girl frowned, staring at the number on his uniform. “You look different again.”

He felt a chill. “Are you One?” he asked.

“You even sound different,” she stared. Then the girl shook her head, movement that carried into the long brown twists of her hair like a cresting wave, revealing the number twelve on her uniform. She murmured, “Sometimes I’m called Mari,” and gestured softly through the iron grid of their cell wall, pointing at a neighboring cot. “One sleeps there.” The girl wrapped her arm around her leg, pulling her knee over her chest. He looked in her eyes; “You don’t remember us?”

Sephiroth shook his head.

“They took you to the back room, you…” Mari trailed off; Sephiroth swallowed. “We thought you were dead. What happened?”

“I…” He couldn’t think of anything to say. “Is this Project C?”

“Shit, Sev. How much did you forget this time?” Sephiroth frowned. _Was it a common occurrence,_ he wondered, _for children here to forget like that?_ Suddenly, the loss of his memories and his amnesiac return from Jenova’s harbor seemed less exceptionally foreign; the loss of that exceptionalism felt briefly more noticeable than any sense of connection he had to the girl. That came more slowly, a soft nudge as he noticed the similarity between his sense of normality and his cellmate’s. He shifted uncomfortably. “Yes,” Sephiroth said. It was truthful, in a sense. “I don’t remember being here.”

Mari let out a small, almost childish laugh that jarred him for its abrupt departure from her earlier sadness. She looked away, and her sadness returned. “Easy way to know if it’s you,” she handed him her cup and said slowly: “If you’re from here, you’ll be home now.”

“I am,” he whispered. The smells, the cold steel, the energy in the air… _It was a terrible home, perhaps, but he felt a stunned sense of familiarity, a twisted sort of ease._ To be surrounded by others who looked at him without fear, with recognition… _It was a jarring relief, a painful relief._ It reminded Sephiroth of particularly grueling training, when his muscles would become so inured to the pain he wouldn’t feel how much he hurt until the session ended. Aesis was right, there was a possibility of connection here.

“It’s tea,” Mari pointed. He looked at the cup in his hand and didn’t remember accepting it. It was still warm. “What’s the last thing you remember, Sev?” Mari asked. Sephiroth scoffed; he caught a glimpse of his distorted reflection in nearby tile and cringed. His hair was cut to his ears, ears that were still too large for his face. _He was thirteen again,_ he thought. _What fresh hell._

He remembered her question and the memory spilled out of him before he could care to stop it. It was a real memory, his first from around that age. Sephiroth remembered his first kill. Next to him, a Shinra infantryman, decapitated. Sephiroth remembered his head falling, like someone had dropped a ball, or a melon, or any other innocuous thing, falling into gravity as if it had never held a human life. A Wutian soldier, in front of him, bleeding. He heard a scream, a scream to _do it_ , to take his body. To kill him. Sephiroth noticed Mari’s face as he told the story, and thought it must have sounded strange; he stopped. _To take his body._ He had been trained to kill for so long, but when it happened the only way his barely pubescent mind could live with himself was to call it that. 

Mari smiled slightly, and said, "That should feel really fucked up, shouldn't it? Sometimes it still does."

He looked at her, and knew that her muted smile should have repelled him; it didn’t. He felt a strange warmth in his chest. Mari pulled on her finger, her body jerked and she looked away. Guards were approaching the cell next to them. He craned his neck to see blonde curls poking over an infantryman’s arm.

“One,” Mari said as the girl pulled herself up off the floor, propping herself against the edge of her cot. It was the girl from earlier, he saw, the girl with venetian curls and grey eyes. Her arms and legs were covered with bandages. Her face still streaked with dirt, she looked barely there, she looked exhausted. Mari jumped up, running to the iron bars that partitioned their cages and reaching through them.

One let out the beginnings of a startled breath that was stifled as the jerk of her diaphragm send a sharp pain through her body; her entire body seemed to twist. She moved away from Mari’s hand and met her gaze with guilty eyes. “Mari,” she breathed. Mari pulled her hand away and nodded.

“Battle VR,” she murmured, her words slurred, looking at Sephiroth. He stared; it took him a moment to realize she was referring to his story. _She must have heard him in the hallways._ In the absence of feline eyes, augmented hearing was a subtle reminder of what was happening in that place, a subtle reminder of who that girl could be. “Perhaps,” he replied softly. One paused, wincing in pain as she shifted to lean against her cell wall. “Wutian front, battle sequence 64,” she recited from memory. “We ran that training two weeks ago. I didn’t know you made a kill.”

“Uh, yes,” he exhaled. _That day, he’d made far more than a single kill._

"I'm glad you're okay, Sev."

“One had a panic attack,” Mari teased, smiling. Her hand smacked in her friend’s direction. One rolled her eyes, her hand could barely smack back, her fingers lingered on concrete close to Mari’s knee. “It was probably just a reaction to the drugs,” she offered a smile like Mari’s, a smile that should have chilled him, in context, but instead it seemed to soothe. Abruptly, she appeared overtaken by a shudder, and looked away. “I never want to feel that way again. I thought I was dying.” She looked at him with distant eyes and said softly, “But I wasn’t the one who died.” She rocked involuntarily, and winced at the pain. Mari reached through the bars and took her hand. “It wasn’t real.”

“It will be. Did you get the nightmares after?” One asked him. He nodded.

“They’re rough,” she replied numbly.

“What’s your real name?” He asked.

One smiled; Sephiroth was learning swiftly that in Project C, as with himself, the meaning behind a smile could change dramatically. “I don’t have one,” her hand shook. “I don’t remember anything before this. But if I could pick one…” She smiled.

Mari smirked, “You’d make Hojo call you Queen Bitch?”

One tried to laugh, and sputtered at the pain. She said softly, “I’d make him call me King.”

Sephiroth smiled. The girl curled her lip, resting her head against the wall. He watched her hand pull a loose edge of tile out of the floor; she rubbed its rough edge against her palm as she looked at him. “Your eyes are… they’re not…” he observed, gesturing to his own in an effort to finish the thought. One nodded.

“She’s resistant,” Mari intoned. “Even her biology tells them to get fucked. One, you can’t keep fighting this. They’ll kill you.”

“Mari’s a dreamer,” One chuckled. “She thinks they won’t kill us anyway.” Mari glared, One squeezed her hand. _Was that a joke?_ Sephiroth wondered. “She keeps me going,” his biologically rebellious conversation partner added, her voice soft.

“They didn’t… hurt Seven,” Mari gestured at Sephiroth. “Maybe they know how to do the treatment now, maybe we’ll make it out of here.”

“You and me,” One whispered in a blend of hope and placation, her eyes closing as she succumbed to the lull of sleep. "To the end."

In a crack, the air in the cage was red. His saw red eyes and jumped up. A shadow came at them, and he was fighting it before he realized what he was doing, holding ground between those teeth and Mari. One jumped up. She lifted her arms to block a bite and punched forward with the edge of her tile in hand; the weight of the monster flew back to him. Something in the corner of his eye seemed to explode; suddenly, the mirror in One’s cell shattered. Sephiroth sent a kick to launch the monster toward it. The glowing, demonic expression around them was refracted into a thousand pieces, evaporating in its own reflection. He heard manic laughter as it disappeared.

It was over in a few seconds. One moved to stamp out a burning shred of paper.

"Fucking shit."

"What was that?"

"Maybe something escaped?" One shook her head. “Gods, Seven,” she exhaled. “Did they teach you to fight like that?" One grinned, without avarice or reserve. Sephiroth blinked and felt a small smile cross his lips. His skill was so muted, compared to the first time he and Aesis had fought together, _yet her reaction was so much more free_. 

Mari reached to pushed at her hair and laughed before he could answer, a slightly shrill sound, a subtle divergence from the pitch she’d just used. It jarred him, though he couldn't place why. “They’re parts of the ventilator under us when they cut, they’re projections on the wall but… I don’t know who’s who.” One swallowed, rushing to hold her friend’s cheek, whispering to soothe her. Mari smiled and whispered, “They don’t have names, anymore. The dead. They’re gnashing teeth, angry numbers. Seven ate nine.” Her eyes flashed manic and dulled, he saw a tear run down her cheek.

One pulled Mari’s face closer, pressing her forehead to her own; after a moment, Mari relaxed.

Sephiroth felt a stab of pain and shifted. He had seen soldiers succumb to the throws of neuroses in war, he had seen psychotic breaks. Was that what had happened? _Was it the monster?_ As a General, he could refer them to care, but here… _What could he do, as a teenage prisoner? As a monster in a cage?_ He felt his own body shake; the feeling of stepping back into that helplessness made him weak, ill. He tried to suppress it. “Should I give you privacy?” He asked quietly, looking for something to do as much as anything else, gathering himself to move to the far side of the cell.

“Stay,” Mari’s smile was kind, her voice more normal. He blinked. “If something escaped, we should stick together…” She trailed off, and looked back at One. The adrenaline had worn off, and One was clutching her side. She leaned her weight against the grid, pushing dirt out of her eyes; he could see a small amount of blood beginning to seep through a bandage on her arm. Stitches, he imagined, pulled when she fended off the monster's attack. Her fingers laced around Mari’s, her curls fell over her face as she let her head rest against the cold stretch of a metal bar. One still held the broken tile in her other hand, her finger absently rubbed its texture. “Can you sing, One?” Mari asked.

“Some say love,” Mari began, hoarse, her voice barely audible. One joined on a whisper,“—love, it is a river, that drowns the tender reed.” One coughed; her throat was tight, her voice buried in the back of it as though it was too painful, in that moment, for a voice to be anywhere else in her body. She winced. “Some say love,” Mari whispered back.

One replied on pitch, her voice a thin, wavering thread that was tiny in the space of their cell block: “it is a razor, that leaves your soul to bleed.”

“Some say love, it is a hunger, an endless aching need,” came another voice from the darkness, an unseen boy’s breaking tenor, “I say love, it is a flower, and you, it’s only seed.”

Sephiroth felt his body stiffen into stoic posture, but he was holding his breath. He listened as a few more voices joined the choir: all tensed, silenced in torture, they were voices fleeing the hurt bodies that held them, fleeing the bones that were too sore and too broken to vibrate without agony, but still they sang. They flitted in and out of any appealing resonance, they shifted easily into cracks and rasps, but still, they held each other up. One buried her face between the bars, resting her head on Mari’s shoulder with her eyes screwed shut. Her voice got a little stronger.

“It’s the soul afraid of dying—,” she opened her eyes on that last word, and Sephiroth saw hot tears, he heard terror and determination in her shaking voice that pierced him, “—that never learns to live.” He saw, in that moment, how deeply One believed that she would die.

He wrapped his arm across his chest, holding his shoulder. His eyes felt hot, wet; his thoughts traveled to the question that had ached in him his entire life, the question of what it felt like to be with a family. _He hadn’t learned that parents sang to their children until he was a teenager._ He did not cry, he did not move, but listened as children of Project C sang to lift each other through the night, moving on shattered sound toward the uncertain threat of tomorrow:

_When the night has been too lonely,_

_And the road has been too long,_

_And you think that love is only_

_For the lucky and the strong,_

_Just remember, in the winter_

_Far beneath the bitter snow_

_Lies the seed that, with the sun’s love,_

_In the spring becomes the rose._

* * *

“They’re still unconscious.” Vincent frowned. “Their vitals are stable, but their neural readings… the Medbot is being stretched to its limits. Their neural networks so unpredictably regress, it’s as if they’re moving through time.” It was too speculative for him to say comfortably, but he could see that Tifa needed answers.

“I believe that Aesis and Sephiroth, in their combined power, have kept this monster from acting on the planet through them.” He shook his head. “It needs to overpower them. I think it’s sending all three of them back in time, finding times when their hatred was most violent, forcing them to relive it. It will try to consume them _then_ , in another time, as they were consumed before, and when it overwhelms them it will use them to unleash itself on the world. We both know where it’s going to take Sephiroth, I think. _When_ it will take him.”

Tifa shuddered.

“Would it take her to Junon?” Vincent asked, his jaw tensing.

“Maybe,” Tifa nodded. “But if this thing really wants to eat her alive, something happened before that. Something I think was worse.” She swallowed. “It happened in the Orphanage.”


	11. Nibelheim Files, Episode 3: Fleurs de Nepenthe pt 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> TW: Apocalypse Now-inspired depictions of war and violence, emotionally abusive romantic dialogue, a dubious kiss, child abuse/neglect, traumatic themes, and a whole fuckton of emotional lability. 
> 
> There's more problematic Seph/Gen in this one, which is written to be unhealthy, but I've tried to make it consistent with canon and offer one idea for what Gen meant when he said "your glory should have been mine".
> 
> Aesis regains consciousness in the middle of the Wutian War. She must figure out how to fight the monster who sent them falling back in time, but when she sees Genesis and Sephiroth together Aesis realizes she's beginning to feel something that is changing and terrifying her. Uncertain if she still has the strength to fight, emotion bouncing between hatred and terror, sometimes barely able to think, Aesis still sets out to confront the little girl's monster and get them all home safe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Recap: So far in Fleurs, both Aesis and Sephiroth had PTSD-ish dreams that confronted them with their respective fears of intimacy. Madam M showed up with a new mission: news of a girl, consumed by a monster of hatred, who escaped Corneo's men and needs their help. As they search for her in the Nibeli forests, Sephiroth and Aesis become increasingly vulnerable and Sephiroth sees how afraid Aesis is. Before she can tell him why, Tifa finds carnage left in the little girl's wake, and the gang turn their attention to the task at hand. 
> 
> The girl, consumed by the monster of hatred, attacks the gang, and a monster like the one from Contrapasso overtakes Aesis and Sephiroth. In Contrapasso, Aesis and Sephiroth discovered that combining their attacks will defeat the monster, a discovery symbolized in Aesis' awkward sentence "You cut, I fire". Afterward, however, they lost their memory of fighting it, and without their memories, they're unable to fight off the girl's monster before its bite knocks them unconscious and sends them back in time. Vincent realizes that because the monster was unable to overpower them in the present, it takes Aesis and Sephiroth back to their most violent experiences of hatred, hoping to consume them and unleash their power against the planet. 
> 
> Sephiroth wakes up as a young teenager in The Orphanage, where he's confused with subject 7-C, who has been killed, and sent into the same cage as 1-C, or "One", who he thinks may be Aesis, and her close friend, Mari (From Chapter 2 we know that 1-C is Aesis but he doesn't remember her specimen classifier). The monster has not left them; Sephiroth sees its reflection in the mirror, overtaking his own face, invading the expression of others. He is able to fight it off in their cell, and sees shattered mirrors, distorted clocks, and mysterious explosions that seem to mark its presence. As he spends time with his cellmates, Sephiroth begins to share stories similar to theirs, and entertains the idea that he may not be as alone as he once believed himself to be. He experiences some of the comfort that the community of Project C children can offer, but the clock is ticking. 
> 
> Or, you know, melting, as the case may be.
> 
> Recommended music: Which Witch by Florence + The Machine. Song in-text is Je l'aime à mourir, by Francis Cabrel.
> 
> Also French is Wutian in this because ~~I don't speak enough Japanese to get to a bathroom~~ deep reasons. *finger guns*

_Tat tatatatata… tat tatatatata…._

“What the—”

Aesis felt something sharp in her side; her body recoiled before she knew what was happening. Her arm lashed out, and her fist hit something. “Arrête!” She yelled in Wutian. _Stop._ He didn’t; she felt air stroke her cheek as a blade missed her by millimeters.

She saw a helmut, a sword recoiling, threw an elbow that made decisive, if incautious, contact with the soft flesh of her attacker’s throat before diving behind a nearby couch. The man fell, choking. Her hand hit upholstery, she felt thick brocade and stared. _She recognized that pattern. Wutian front. Battle sequence 91. Was she dead? Was this hell?_

_Tat tatatatatatatatatatata…_

She caught movement in her periphery and reached for the nearest weapon: an iron poker near the fireplace. Aesis used the nonfunctional end as a makeshift bat, spinning it to get a feel for the weight. The first infantryman fired; Aesis deflected the bullets against the poker’s metal, closing the distance between them. She spun, taking out a knee, his chin. _Another one;_ she twisted her opponent’s arm and aimed his gun at his comrade’s throat. A few more swarmed in; she made short work of them, finishing the last with the poker embedded in his chest. To her shock, their bodies did not fade in the glitching freeze frame of a VR projection; rather, they rose up in mako, lifting to the lifestream. _They were real. Did that mean…_ She ran outside the house. Chaos reigned, set against the backdrop of a jaundiced yellow sky. It was midnight, it was the merciless noonday sun. She didn’t know. Screaming. The relentless _tatatat_ of artillery fire. Behind the town, along the definition of its border, a wall of fire erupted down a line of wild palms; she smelled burning gasoline. _Insurgent attacks.  
_

In front of her, suddenly, Aesis saw a little girl. _The_ little girl. She yelled out for her and ran. “We are multidimensional projections in time, but time is not a straight line,” came the girl’s dazed murmur as she watched Aesis approach. “What did you just say?” Aesis whispered, pupils dilating in her memories. “What— Who are you? What is happening?”

“You held onto him, but you got the wires crossed. Silly, it will split you two apart,” The little girl smiled, “They thought they were its masters but it can split the world apart.”

“ _Wires crossed –"_ Aesis ducked to grab hold of the girl’s shoulders, demanding to know what she meant; red eyes smirked in the girl’s irises; in a flash, she disappeared. A burst of red light folded into another explosion that shook earth under Aesis’ feet. She leaned to catch her balance, noticing for the first time that she was dressed in civilian clothes, a simple shift dress. Linen. Her materia was bezeled in a necklace; she tucked it under her collar and took stock of her surroundings. She saw people running, heard cries of _démon. Demon. The monster?_

_No. The other demon._

She turned against the crown and saw him marching toward her, flanked by SOLDIER seconds. _The demon of Wutai._

He took her breath away.

Chemical clouds, yellow haze lifted off the fire around him. He stood a head taller than the others; his presence put the explosions to shame. _Attention,_ she heard a mechanized voice projecting over them in the wrong language, _Attention citizens of Wutai. This territory is now the property of the Shinra—_ the rote script of Shinra’s colonial ambitions faded; she couldn’t take her eyes off him. Blood matted hair around his face, stained his pauldrons. His eyes looked out from that crimson frame with piercing acuity; Aesis ducked on instinct, twisting out of his eyeline. _It would make sense to wonder_ , she realized, _if this was the Sephiroth she knew, if the monster had thrown them together into this first hellish day of Shinra’s final ground invasion of the Wutian war._ But she didn’t wonder, and in the stakes of a war zone she trusted that instinct. _She knew_. _He wasn’t._ Desolation burned in his eyes with the icy edge of winter, more visceral that in the Com Sim, more painful. The Sephiroth she knew was cracked open by the scars of his madness; more and more, the Sephiroth she knew would speak. _This man’s silence reached his bones,_ she felt, as if scaffolded on the structure of his superiority. _He was the only person there who knew he would not die that day._ _What could he possibly say?_

She looked down as he passed; she didn't want to risk being seen. She needed to figure out what was happening. _They thought they were its masters… The girl was referring to the monster,_ Aesis realized. _If anyone was megalomaniacal enough to believe they could master that kind of power,_ _it was Shinra._ She watched the General’s back move further away. _If it was Shinra, they kept records._ A plan hatched in her mind. She slipped a pair of sunglasses off an abandoned storefront stand, observing how immensely lucky she was that it was there, and ducked into the crowd. _They were rounding up the townsfolk, rooting for insurgents,_ she knew. _They’d be refugees, prisoners of war, some dead before the day was done._

It took a few minutes for her to realize he was injured. She saw blood shine on his leather coat, noticed a tear in his coat hidden underneath his pauldron.

Then she saw red hair, another man stepped out of a back alley, a red trench coat styled like he was stepping off a runway.

“Oh fuck off,” she grumbled as the trench coat took stride next to Sephiroth. _Genesis._ Jealousy, she named it, though this felt annihilating. _The monster didn’t pull punches._ Aesis pulled her lips taught into something between a death glare and a smile, strong-arming her jealousy back in its box. _Adult,_ she reminded herself, not gently. _Stay on mission, Commander Aesis._ Her eyes narrowed. Then she saw Sephiroth’s finger reach, as if in response to Genesis' arrival, in the direction of his opposite shoulder; a split second in search of comfort he immediately denied himself. His hand flexed, his posture steeled, but the moment cracked his otherwise invulnerable display. It was the sort of thing she noticed, the sort of thing she had learned to weaponize. This time, she did not parse that data into a plan of attack; rather, something in her own chest cracked open. It was something warm, something that re-centered her focus from _having him_ to fighting _for_ him. Aesis felt the warmth in her chest spill into tears, and wondered if she was losing her mind. She fixed her sunglasses. _How the fuck was she meant to run recon like this?_

She hated it. She felt weak, afraid, helpless, yet she had to move. She remembered her conversation with Tifa: … _if I fell in love with him? That would take a strength I don’t think I have._ Mari’s face flashed in her mind, and Aesis shook the whole miserable train of thought out of her head.

As she approached the section of civilians they’d blocked for processing near Shinra's camps, the butt of a infantryman’s gun hit her shoulder; Aesis did not react as it knocked her to the ground, hoping that he would push her into the crowd. No luck: the man grabbed her dress, forcing her onto her knees. He yanked her hair, snapped her head back. A foot hit her ribs; Aesis yelled out in pain. The infantryman hissed a few violating epithets in her ear, pulling her head back more fully, adding loudly that she seemed suspicious. A violent force sent her into the ground; The cold, wet buffering of muddy earth filled the space between her fingers. Aesis scrambled for her sunglasses. Before she could stop herself, she had reached to block motion near her head; it was only then she recognized the edge of a leather coat, only then she realized she’d seized Sephiroth’s wrist. He was reaching for her sunglasses. _Oh fucking shit, why was he—_ “J’suis aveugle,” she burst out in a pointedly thick Wutian accent, hoping that her reflexes wouldn’t give her away. “S’il vous plaît, monsieur. Please.”

 _Something in him felt murderous,_ she registered it immediately; she stilled her pounding heart as its sound reverberated in her ears, she willed her clutching breath to a steady inhale.

_Something in him felt afraid, too._

Sephiroth’s eyes narrowed; he paused in a moment she could not decipher. _Did he recognize her?_ That was impossible. _Did he doubt her?_ “She’s blind, private,” he said finally, yanking back his hand. “Let her go.” Aesis exhaled.

_Merde._

“I’ll see you later,” the infantryman whispered in her ear before he left. She did not react, choking down her outrage to stand slowly, flipping a stone plucked from the earth between her fingers as she memorized the number sewn into his uniform. _55031._

 _Looking forward._

* * *

She had trained enough in the simulation of that incursion to know how to sneak into the camps once at processing, how to exploit shift changes, passing shadows, and weak points in chain fences. It didn’t take long to knock out an infantryman and steal his uniform. To her surprise, where it made best tactical sense to do so, and where righteous rage once lifted to meet the urgency of the situation, she couldn’t kill him. Something stopped her, a tremble of pain high in her chest, weakness in her hands. She left him unconscious, bound, his breathing ragged against the gentle sound of long Wutian grass rustling in the breeze. The wind and grass themselves seemed unaware of the death, the fire, the yellow poison running through them; it was as if this day was too small to move the monoliths of nature, where this day would day consume so, so many men.

She pushed it out of her mind and pressed on.

Once at the medical units, she’d anticipated carnage. This was the day that Wutian insurgents struck back against Shinra’s troops. An orchestrated series of attacks, she remembered from the news. _Welcome back,_ a woman’s voice, concise, poised, _to our continuing coverage of terrorist retaliation against Shinra’s peacekeeping troops in Wutai. Today, the bloodiest day in recent memory, as explosions tore apart the Wutian Coast in response to Shinra’s arrival at dawn this morning. We’ve received word that around noon the tide was turned, with our troops rallying to meet this desperate day under the leadership of one man._

_General Sephiroth has undoubtably secured his legend as a war hero in the wake of today’s decisive and unlikely victory. Our correspondent is live on the scene—_

She slipped into a medical trailer, weaving over and between the bodies of the wounded; they were as she remembered them, yet their cries pierced her as never before. The feel of a desperate man’s hand, shaking as fingers possessed by agony brushed her uniform, screaming for his life, for water, for another’s compassion; his screams might have ripped his voice apart. She looked back, touched his hand, suddenly believing that if she ignored his cries and he survived, his voice might still die.

She looked back, and saw he wouldn’t survive.

The medical trailer, she thought at first, was empty. She let out a ragged breath, biting into her own hand to muffle the sound. Then Aesis heard another man’s voice, and ducked behind shelves of supplies with bated breath. On a mirror on the wall, she could see a reflection of silver hair, then movement. _Red._ Sephiroth was sitting shirtless; behind him, Genesis was suturing the wound on his back.

_Fuck._

“You helped me today, Genesis."

“When the war of the beasts brings about the world’s end, the goddess descends from the sky,” the other man chuckled, waving his hand; something acerbic, something aching, laced the edges of his tone. “No one else seems to think so.”

Genesis’ heel struck tile as his weight shifted; he intoned, “If a man pushes his General out of destruction’s inimitable path, and the media _only_ broadcasts that General’s consequent victory, did the man ever rescue his General?”

Aesis winced.

Sephiroth’s voice was a stone wall, cracked foundations and impenetrable facade. "Something... happened." He looked like he wanted to say more, but Aesis was unsure what. She frowned.

"I saw."

“You have my gratitude."

 _He doesn’t want your gratitude, you poor dumb idiot,_ she rolled her eyes. _He wants to be the world’s favorite son._

Aesis glared at a spot at the wall, recognizing that she wanted to be where Genesis was; for an instant, as she bounced off her hatred, she wanted to rest her head on Sephiroth’s chest, to _rest_. Aesis jerked with terror at how easy it was, in that instant, to forget that this Sephiroth would sooner run her through with Masamune, to forget that this Sephiroth was in love with another. _That was what she was so afraid of_. _That, exactly._ The way love could attack the connections in her mind, ablate her ability to perceive things in context. Ablate her ability to accurately perceive threat.

She maneuvered back to hatred, back to the feeling of firm ground _,_ and glared at Genesis’ reflection.

 _Flamboyant fighter,_ Aesis discerned, tracing the contours of his pain as if she was preparing to fight him. _Annihilating, risk-taking. Entitled,_ she emphasized, _self-sabotaging._ She breathed, rolled her eyes. _Gods, if she added empathy and removed just some of the entitlement, she might have been describing herself._

 _"_ You did it because they hit me?" His voice gave the impression of a desert in the rain.

Sephiroth didn't respond. "Perhaps," he said finally, his voice stalling as he endeavored inward. "I... Yes."

Genesis sneered. It seemed to Aesis that Genesis’ wounds ran deeper than she'd realized, rivers leading to an ocean of suffering that no other’s love alone could heal. _But Genesis was motivated by his own glory, by the confused notion that idol worship was his right, and his medicine._ There, they differed greatly. _She was motivated by… justice_ , _freedom, not only for herself. Revolution._ Except in that moment, when the most important thing in the world to her was getting them home safe. She felt another tear and blinked angrily. From hatred, back to warmth in her chest. _Again._ She felt like a damn ball, hitting solid ground, hateful ground where she knew how to stand strong, and then bouncing off again. Air. Free of hatred. _Helpless, in freefall._

_She was changing._

_Did this feat of personal growth have to happen specifically now?_

“Your gratitude,” Genesis curled his lip into something between a smile and a smirk, imbued with sadness… with cruelty that cut straight to the core of her. It occurred to Aesis that she might be seeing the moment Genesis’ deepest hatred for his friend was born.

“Your gratitude is not a gift often bestowed.” Sephiroth barely reacted, a slight hitch in his breath. _He was undone_ , she realized, _by the smallest effort to offer him knowledge of himself. It was something everyone needed,_ she knew, _to be helped to discover who they were. By his own admission, it was something Sephiroth had never known._ She remembered how she’d felt when Tsukahara had done the same for her, though the idea of effectively reparenting his enemy left him visibly disgusted. He did not want to use or corrupt her; he saw how she had already been corrupted, and eventually, he learned some of how she had been used. He wanted her to confront herself _._ That was Tsukahara’s ultimately loving purpose, to give her back to herself, to uproot the seeds of destruction Shinra had sewn in her, to stem the tides of hatred that had caused him so much suffering.

“How far we’ve come,” Genesis finished the suture. “Do you remember when we first met?” His fingers lingered on Sephiroth’s back. “I challenged you.” Sephiroth looked toward Genesis with a subtle smirk, the intensity of his gaze hinted at what he might have been feeling.

“You were not the first foolish enough to do that,” Sephiroth replied.

Genesis exhaled, sharp, pulling his hand away. “Yet here we are.”

“You told me then my heart is cold,” his voice was gelid, Aesis smiled softly. She knew beneath those glaciers, fissures gave rise to thermal vents, to billowing geysers and dormant, submarine volcanoes. “Genesis, I… I believe, from today... I am not…” _Silence._ What he knew of himself beyond his military prowess Sephiroth seemed unable to express. Left unspoken, he had no way to counter the projections of others; it was in the unspoken and unspeakable that anything could be made true, and any truth could be made unreal.

“You are cold, Sephiroth, by the goddess, cold and almighty,” Genesis sneered. He was wrong, and despite his insistence that Sephiroth was cold, Genesis’ own words hit like ice. _Projection._ She wanted to scream. Genesis told Sephiroth who he was with such certainty. _Ask him,_ she ranted in her own mind. _Ask him who he is. Ask him if he’s cold, don’t tell him. Don’t corrupt him in the confines of who you’ve decided he is_. “Sephiroth, the great war machine. Hero, now,” Genesis finished. Sephiroth stared. “Hero of the dawn. Had I these accolades, I might finally return home to respect, to love. You, you have no love at the end of this, no desire for it. Where is your passion? Where is your purpose? Yet they choose you—”

Sephiroth shook his head; he looked skeptical. He looked guilty. "This is... politics. This is not..."

Aesis shook her head. She doubted Genesis could ask Sephiroth who he was. His projections allowed him to dehumanize the person he thought had taken the glory he deserved. _Dehumanizing him would allow Genesis to justify destroying his friend._

She wanted to punch something.

_No wonder Sephiroth believed he was an abomination._

Sephiroth made no effort to protest, no effort to reclaim who he was. He clenched his jaw, shook his head. “Then I will tell the reporters—"

“—Don’t you dare,” Genesis snapped; as the sound of his pride faded, for a moment, he softened.

Genesis stepped forward, the suffering she saw in his softness collapsed into a charismatic, hardened performance of the same wound.

Genesis whispered, “I don’t want you to give me anything, Sephiroth.” His canines cut into his friend’s name as he spoke it, a smirk lifted into his eyes as he rolled the name on his tongue. His finger traced the underside of the man’s chin.

“I want to take it.”

He paused, jaw tensing, then guided Sephiroth’s lips to his own.

Aesis looked away.

It felt like a confession. It felt like a threat.

The kiss fell through a glacial crevasse separating cruelty and love. she felt hot tears fall down her cheek, biting against the pain in her chest. She glanced at Genesis’ reflection as he left, and could not shake the feeling that this kiss would be lost, as Sephiroth had just been, to the ether of the unspoken, the ether of contempt; she thought it was the sort of kiss where one man would long for more without the courage to ask for it, and the other, in his bottomless self-loathing, would pretend it never happened.

 _Genesis must have been through hell too_ , she thought as her fury quieted to mere rage _, to have no sense of love beyond glory._ Despite herself, Aesis recognized the tragedy as she watched Sephiroth leave, silent. Had they known how to water their roots in compassion, not in the hatred and envy of zero-sum transactions, she saw how they might have complimented each other.

They could have had a magnificent love.

* * *

Aesis waited a few minutes after Genesis and Sephiroth left, breathing, warmth and freefall like a mess in her. _It was terror._ That feeling of freefall. _That feeling was terror._ If she focused on destruction, on destroying Shinra's oppression, destroying regime, she did not feel afraid. But if she focused on this warmth, on the notion of fighting for love, even fighting to protect herself, protect Sephiroth, protect that little girl… _She had not felt a terror like it since the Orphanage._ It would be easier to throw them all away, to destroy those feelings, destroy their worth, destroy her own humanity and theirs; she couldn't. _It mattered too much._ Back to terror. Anything would be easier. It was terror that seemed to consume her sense of self, consume her mind. Even her body felt awkward, felt weaker, in it.

_Fucking fantastic._

_Aesis,_ she remembered Tsukahara's voice, _yours seems to be the kind of rage where all humanity is stripped away, your humanity, and the humanity of everyone else. You are seeing red._ She breathed, remembering the hard warmth in his words. _I think this rage is your beginning, and for now, it is your end._

_You did not choose what was done to you, but you are the only one who is responsible for it now. You must decide what your hatred will become._

_Decide._

She looked in the mirror and realized her expression was changing. Her eyes seemed to lift away from her skull, pulling into a red glare, burning; her mouth lifted, lifted into a malicious grin. Aesis opened her mouth in a silent scream, punching through the mirror’s glass before she could think. It shattered, and the face disappeared. _The monster._

Shaking, she ran to a computer, wrapping her lacerated hand in gauze from the supply shelves. She didn’t anticipate that R&D would have uploaded much to Shinra’s network, but it was possible that something about this monster would have made it into their system. “Okay,” Aesis muttered, wondering what on earth to search for. “Evil shadow monster from hell.” She stared; she didn’t know where it came from, but she felt it in her bones:

_Monster [space] split [space] casualties [space]  
_

She found one entry from a lab notebook. A grainy black and white photograph, a shadow passing over a mirror, and a report, almost all of it redacted.

_FIFTEEN [15] TECHNICIANS DEAD. [redacted]. ESCAPE FROM SHINRA HQ CONFIRMED. LAST FOOTAGE ATTACHED._

_EFFORTS TO CONTAIN [redacted] HAVE FAILED._

_SAMPLE A[redacted] number [redacted] DESIGNATED FOR IMMEDIATE TERMINATION. [Redacted] UNSTABLE._

Aesis felt a stabbing pain in her head and leaned forward, clutching her temples.

 _A five year-old girl, running._ _Wisps of blonde hair pulled up on her head haphazardly, her face, smudged with dirt and blood, streaked with tears and sweat._

_A screech rained down, an unworldly force ripped the air apart. White light split the sky. Napalm skies were exploding overhead, the ground was erupting in flames._

She cried out and stumbled to her feet.

_You cut, I fire._

_What the fuck. What the fuck—?_

Aesis heard a noise, _footsteps_ , and fled. She did not see Sephiroth, who had stopped as he walked from the medical unit, realizing that as he put on his armor, he heard the sound of someone breathing. She did not know he returned to the tent, or that when he did, he found a shattered mirror, shards of glass stained with blood. In her fear, Aesis had forgotten that mirror, and would not realize it until it was too late. She would not know that only moments later, as Sephiroth followed a trail of blood from the mirror to one of the unit's computers, reports that a guard had been attacked near processing had flashed across his PHS.

Aesis inferred that something like that happened, however, when she heard the alarms sound. She was slipping back into the processing camp, wearing linen and sunglasses. Alarms, dogs barking, terrified guards on the tail of the bloodiest day in their army’s history, shooting, terrified Wutians reaching to hold their loved ones, crying. _Her terror, her choice to spare one, would cause so much terror in others, would cost so many more people their lives._ Aesis closed her eyes.

Despite all of it, she realized, she still had to fight this monster. Despite how hideously botched that recon mission had been, she now had an idea of how.

_The consequences of that seemed as unbearable as the consequences of her hatred._

* * *

They rounded her up at gunpoint with a group of other women, and drove them away from the camp to a grassy bald atop a forested hill. She felt the high grass, soft wisps brushing like ghosts in the night, a comforting touch against the exposed skin of her hand. She smelled dew.

A hand had clasped her arm, bruising, and Aesis had heard a hateful, familiar voice as she was pushed to her knees. There were numbers in her peripheral vision. A guard’s uniform. _55031._

Aesis smirked. The van’s radio, left on, was playing _Je l’aime à mourir_ ; an old Wutian folk song. _Elle a dû faire toutes les guerres de la vie, et l’amour aussi._ Aesis exhaled softly as she heard her next would-be executioner brandish some sort of weapon. _She must have fought all the wars,_ the song went, _all the wars of life, and of love._ She looked out past the van and saw a Wutian night, serene and hopeful, a bird flying across the moon. She smiled, and felt afraid.

Then, in the van window, the reflection of the infantryman’s face began to stretch, began to blur; its eyes were distorting, lifting into a red glare, lips wrapping higher and higher in a sinister grin. Before she could scream, she heard him: “Where did we leave off?” Aesis’ attention was yanked back to the more proximal threat, to his rank breath and the sneering lift of his nostril. She felt almost relieved: _back to hatred._ A switch flipped in her mind. “I want to see how ugly you are,” he continued. He pulled her head back and reached for her glasses. Aesis closed her eyes, listening. _He’d pulled a short blade. Bad plan._ “Damn. No scars, no disfigurement. We’ll soon fix that, won’t we. Shame you can’t see what I’m about to do to you—”

She’d twisted the sword through his throat before he could finish the word. Aesis opened her eyes wide, staring with an animal’s fury as she stood and watched her attacker die. A gun fired; she deflected the bullet and closed the distance, turning the weapon to face its owner as his breaking finger fired a second shot. She flipped the gun over her shoulder and pulled the trigger, landing a shot in the driver’s forehead as he leapt from the van to defend his comrade. There was a moment of reprieve; She tossed the weapons and summoned her sword. A single frequency hummed in the air as her fingers flexed; she heard the music. Aesis staggered for a moment under a surge of fear, of grief and stood despite it, wrapping her hand tighter. The SOLDIERs left alive made uneasy eye contact with each other, readying their weapons; Aesis’s eyes looked wild. She stepped into the fight.

With storm clouds closing overhead, she switched off the van’s radio. She pulled an encrypted Shinra PHS out of its owner’s pocket; he wouldn’t miss it.

Her mind was racing for a plan, she breathed. _It could work._ “Come in,” she prayed Elena had kept the same tongue-in-cheek call-in since her career in Shinra began, “this is alpha-six-tee-nine,” she closed her eyes, “calling in a birthday surprise.” “Stand by,” the silence on the other line seemed to last forever. “Go ahead, Elena. Command’s orders?” Aesis exhaled in relief. _She’d done it. She could save these women, at least._ “We’re running six operatives UC, five plain clothes, one infantry,” she gave the van’s VIN and plate numbers, and spoke as a commander. “They’re going in black. No questions, no footage. They were never here and we never had this conversation, do you understand?”

“Loud and clear.”

She didn’t see Sephiroth, as she prepped the women and sent them on their way, nestled behind the trees where his intuition had led him as he followed his men out of the camp that night. He didn’t know why he chose not to delegate, to attend to the massacre in that processing camp, why he let them leave, but he did. He’d been ready to intervene, but some ambivalence kept him still, watching a small woman, an ostensibly blind Wutian civilian, as she single-handedly took down ten of his soldiers, moonlight flashing with acuity in her large, responsive, serpentine eyes. _Eyes like his own._ Stunned, he watched her cut down bullets and summon a katana from thin air, he watched her thick Wutian accent slip as she smooth-talked her way through their system on Turk credentials.

She didn’t see him, didn’t know he was there, until the van disappeared without her and she felt Masamune’s blade press against her neck. She turned; there he was. They were alone.

He stared at her. "I... I think I'm here to help you."

“Thanks," her breath shook for an instant, then she deadpanned, "I'm good.” 

“There is due process of law for soldiers like him,” he told her. “There are tribunals.”

“What an effective deterrent,” Aesis chucked. She considered their circumstances and smiled. “Tell me, Sephiroth, if you have so much faith in Shinra’s process of law, then why do did you let those women go?”

He exhaled. “You lied to me.”

“I did.”

“Who are you, Wutian? Tell me the truth.”

“A friend,” she said simply, her voice softer.

Sephiroth growled the accusation, tightening his grip in Masamune’s hilt: “Liar.” Aesis felt the blade move against her neck and growled: “I did not say I was _Shinra’s_ friend.”

His eyes widened, then his dutiful demeanor peeled away to reveal something more wild. He sneered into an attack; her assertion bought her the millisecond of confusion she needed to block it. He stepped forward and brought his sword down over her head, she struck Masamune’s edge with her full strength; the force sent them both flying backwards. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. She felt the pure exhilaration of that exchange as she braced, of the power that would push her to the absolute edge; she could see something like it flash through him as well. _Contact,_ she remembered his word _._ There were tears hot in her eyes. She felt it too. _Contact._

Sephiroth stared and asked again: “Tell me the truth. What is this? Who are you? _Why are you here?_ ”

Thunder clapped in the distance; darkness was closing in.

“I’m Aesis. I have to go,” She looked at him and let the tears fall. “I am so fucking scared, Sephiroth,” she admitted finally, “When it comes down to it I’m terrified I’m going to let us down. But I have to keep going. I have to find you."

“What the hell are you—”

Red flashed through the sky; eyes seemed to surround them. The monster was there. The materia in Aesis’ necklace glowed under the linen of her dress and her sword took on its primordial form, molten steel consumed her polished blade and burned. White light flashed, splitting the sky. When she moved, Saya’s blade seemed to puncture the fabric of space and time, leaving a gash cut clean between them, a vortex of shadow and light. She felt wind rushing, heard a sound like a fighter jet taking off as darkness rushed through the long Wutian grass. Her chest cracked into that warmth, that feeling. She looked at Sephiroth a last time, in his duty and defiance, in his goodness and his wild. Her eyes were shining, glistening in fear. Glistening with something like love, though she could not speak it.

“I’ll see you soon,” she whispered.

Aesis jumped.

Everything went black.

* * *

“—else could he be?” The voice was garbled at first, as if she were underwater. Color emerged in the darkness, muted, then more vibrant. Abstractions, blurred vision. She tried to reclaim her senses, tried to focus. “His DNA is a complete match. Hojo must have figured it out.”

She saw him then. Tall, lanky, sat atop an examination table. He was young, she realized, barely a teenager. He hadn’t grown into his ears, silver hair cut just past them fell forward over his eyes. _He was a child_. _He was just a child._ They all had been, but in its ubiquity that fact had seemed normal; seeing Sephiroth in that position made her recognize the atrocity of it.

He was staring at his fingers as if he’d never seen his own hand.

“—I reassigned his specimen classifier. Seven-C. Send him back down.”

 _C_. She recognized that exam room. The cold eyes of the lab tech, his voice as he said _they don’t have names_. The punch in her gut from those words, even twenty years later. The Orphanage. _Wires crossed,_ the little girl had said _._ He was in her memories, as she was in his. _She found him._

Then, in the mirror. His reflection, blurring, shifting. Red eyes changing, maniacal smile, lifting. He saw it; she watched Sephiroth’s eyes widen and screamed out for him. He couldn’t hear her.

_You cut, I fire._

Saya sliced in the direction of Sephiroth’s image, burning the air around them. She felt something lurch, the room erupted in shadow; the monster’s nebulous form slammed into the mirror, shattering it. Its reflection cut spiraling fractals in the shards of glass; with one blow, the monster disappeared.

Her eyes were wide, still edged with fear, lined with tears, but cut with resolute rage, with disgust. It didn’t feel the same like the hatred she knew, but it was powerful.

 _How dare you,_ she thought. _How dare you put us in this hell._

Aesis stepped back into the in-between, and looked out into the darkness.

_How dare you._

From that place, she spoke.

"Bring it on, you motherfucker."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Up next: Falling back into time, Aesis shows up to the ball wearing a blood-stained linen frock and an attitude. We return to the Orphanage, and at least begin the journey to find out what happened there. I may be writing less over the next few weeks because of real life, but I will keep updates on Mondays.


	12. Nibelheim Files, Episode 3: Fleurs de Nepenthe pt 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> TW: This one is fairly tame but does have emotional abuse, graphic depictions of sexualized violence, and child abuse; Shinra is still experimenting on children and using them as soldiers. 
> 
> Some Seph/Gen, with more backstory thrown in.
> 
> Aesis shows up for the ball wearing a linen shift stained with blood, and struggles to figure out what hatred the monster is targeting on the night of a masquerade celebrating Sephiroth's victory.  
> Sephiroth, trapped in the Orphanage, wrestles with his belief that the children of Hojo's experiments are abominations.
> 
> Let me rub my last two surviving brain cells together to start a fire, and I'll write more later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't really do a summary right now. She is tired. 
> 
> The song in-text is Je l'aime à mourir by Cabrel, and I quote the opening scene to La Haine.  
> For soundtrack material, I'd recommend 2Wei's Gangsta's Paradise for the whole masquerade vibe, Talk by Hozier for the Seph/Gen, La Gloria by Gotan Project for the dance scene, and the Maya Jane Coles remix of Movement by Hozier for the scene between Seph and Ae. 
> 
> The uniforms, especially the belts, were inspire by [Wombywoo](https://twitter.com/MakenziePolkas), whose art is gorgeous and sweet and whose picture of the trio dressed up has been on my mind for a while.
> 
> I do want to say for everyone reading this, you guys are awesome. THANK YOU. For anyone who shows for the psychology, for the feminism, I hope you enjoy this. For anyone who's here for smut.... It’s gonna be a while before these murder kitties get together, because there is just… so very much… that needs to be unpacked first. It occurred to me, though, that as an omnipotent narrator I can come up with approximately infinity reasons why Sephiroth should be in various states of undress, and then just sketch that for you. And also for me. But definitely for you ;) So in this part of Fleurs, I give you shirtless Sephiroth’s ass in dress pants, which, it turns out, is the star, best friend, antagonist, main love interest, and hero of this chapter. For all the ladies, gentlemen, and other out there who could also use some Bootiroth in these trying times, I hope it brings you joy.

Slowly, Vincent sipped his drink. Straight bourbon, poured without respect for the theoretical limits of his liver. He stared at the fire Tifa had started; he was there with her, it seemed, and at the same time, he was a thousand miles away. She was telling him the story of the Orphanage.

“It was one of the other kids,” Tifa was saying. “Her cellmate, I think, saved her. But you can imagine.”

Vincent shook his head.

“Gods help us,” he said. “The Aesis I know would burn down the world if she lived through that again.”

“Well, then, you have to have faith,” Tifa swallowed. “Faith she’ll find a better way.”

* * *

_Tat tatatatatatata…. Tat tatatatata…._

He heard artillery fire outside the window; his focus was dominated by the sight of thick brocade upholstery. A couch whose luck in the Wutian war seemed to far exceed that of its owner.

“These are Sephiroth’s missions,” One grumbled. “Wutian war. Final ground incursion. Day one. The insurgents,” she reached for a gun.

“You know the propaganda,” Mari mused in reply. “We’ve been extended the opportunity to achieve his resplendent excellence.”

“Lucky us,” One loaded an assault rifle and drily added, “it’s made for a resplendent childhood. Do we have grenades?”

Mari held up an awkwardly stuffed sack of polyester fur. "We have exploding teddy bears."

Her friend rolled her eyes.

“Do you think he’d like us, Sev, if he were here? Sephiroth?” It was Mari’s question.

“I wonder…” Sephiroth remembered. _Copies?_ Zack had asked him, before one of his final conversations with Genesis. He remembered the hatred that filled him then. _Abominations._ “I worry,” he spoke quietly, “that Sephiroth would think… _we’re_ … monsters.” _Perhaps a part of him did think that, still. His brutal judgement_. He loaded a rifle, emphasizing the force of the movement.

One’s head snapped in his direction, she was glaring. “That’s big talk for a man who was probably grown in a test tube.”

His eyes narrowed dangerously.

“One,” Mari sighed. “It’s just his opinion, Sev’s not calling you a monster.” She looked to Sephiroth. “She’s always on edge during these sims,” Mari explained, but Sephiroth saw a stab of shame in her eyes nonetheless; he felt uneasy, then, realizing that his words had hurt One and Mari both. “Why?” Mari asked him, after a beat. "Why would he think that?" Sephiroth exhaled and shook his head. “How could…” He was staring at the wall, searching for words that could capture the breadth of the loneliness and shame he had carried. “If Sephiroth was… born in circumstances like this,” he managed, “how could he face that alone?” His eyes closed. “They treat us worse than animals, they don’t give us names, don’t give us families…”

“But Sephiroth is a hero,” Mari frowned. “Don’t you think he had those things?”

His head shook, almost outside his control; he struggled to finish his thought, to hold onto language at all. “He would have been alone,” Sephiroth masked his confession in hypothesis, “His whole life, in the labs, in the tests, alone. I think he must have hated himself violently enough to rip the world apart.” Sephiroth shook his head. “He’d hate us too.”

Mari frowned. “Why? We could be his friends.”

One groaned, “Mari, he’s like, fifty.”

“It sounds like you’d hate him back,” Sephiroth snapped. One arched her eyebrow. “I don’t,” she whispered. “They’re trying to turn us into him, Sev, and I know it’s not his fault but I just… I don’t want to lose myself.” When she looked in his eyes, she looked resolute. She looked terrified. “Mari’s right though,” One smiled slowly, wrapping her arm around her friend’s shoulder; her posture was stronger. Her fear had all but disappeared, he noticed, at least the fear she was willing to show. _She was protecting Mari,_ the other girl smiled back, visibly soothed _._

“Sephiroth could hang.”

He stared.

 _For abominations, One and Mari seemed to offer each other care he had never known._ Something in Sephiroth was shaken: the warmth, the sense of family that leaked in through the cracks of these experiments; something human and resilient that refused to die in Hojo’s cruelty, even though children themselves did. He would never have seen it before, in his brutal judgement. He could never have imagined he’d find humanity in those experiments. Then, when he’d learned of the experiments that made him, it seemed like the death of everything.

_These children refused to let it be._

_They created family._

_Tatatatatatat._

“Come on Sev,” Mari held out her hand to him. “Let’s go not die.”

He snorted.

* * *

_Juscqu’à ici, tout va bien. Until this instant, everything’s good._

_The fall doesn’t matter. It’s the landing._ Aesis remembered those words.

_C’est l’atterissage._

She hit the ground.

She opened her eye and stood, ears ringing, echoes reverberating in her skull and an ancient ache in her head, as if a part of her soul long dead and lodged between her eyes was choking breath into tight, atrophied lungs, resuscitated by the sheer force of the concrete. New concrete, absent cracks and rebellious foliage, cold. _Concrete sidewalk. Ifrit’s singed asshair._ She wasn’t in Wutai anymore.

As the ringing dulled, the sound of string instruments began to register, dark, elegant and brooding; blurred faces and looming geometry took focus and sent Aesis’ heart dropping into her chest. She was standing in front of Shinra Tower, she realized, surrounded by a white-tie brigade, perfectly white silks offset by the carved gargoyles of masquerade masks. _She was wearing a linen shift covered in blood._ Aesis ducked behind a car and heard voices, spoken from a stone’s throw away like a merger of ice and hot air. _Genesis never did show much taste in friends, though at this point it can’t be helped. We must tolerate them, and hope that my friend the President has properly considered the risk of letting something that… wild walk freely among us. Really,_ drawled another, _I don’t wish to disparage such an asset to our military endeavors, but I do think he’s strange._

 _That’s no way to speak of a hero,_ Aesis’ eyes narrowed as the first voice replied, _at least not to his face._ She heard self-satisfied laughter and felt her blood boil. Someone more gentle intervened, a stammered protest of _I don’t think that’s fair_ that was immediately steamrolled: _We ought to be relieved the war is over, I suppose, but one will miss the parties._

"Okay," Aesis hissed, “ _N_ _ow_ I’m in hell.” She wasn’t sure where she was in Sephiroth’s memories; she guessed it was part of his Victory celebration, President Shinra’s masturbatory masquerade, canonizing his colonialism as beneficent progress to whet the appetites of share-holders and subsidiaries. The man was gone, taking his blustering air of superiority with him, but in the car window, his reflection lingered and began to stretch, to glow red— Aesis slammed her fist into the glass and as it shattered, the monstrous visage disappeared. She exhaled. _This was the day Shinra’s elite celebrated their imperial conquest; somewhere on the other edge of the world,_ she knew, _Tsukaraha was waking up hidden under blankets to grieve the dead, somewhere else,_ she realized _, she was crying in a cage._ For a moment, Aesis considered scraping the mission to open fire on the whole scene. _It could rewrite history,_ she thought _, in ways that could help so many._

Then she caught a flash of lights in her peripheral vision, she heard a crescendo of paparazzi and harsh yelling: _Here, General! Look at me! Here! Turn!_ A head of silver hair moved over the din. Aesis pressed her lips together as she felt herself step away from her fantasied heroics. She would not shoot these sharks in their gilded barrel; she was somewhere away from revolution. Whatever happened that night, she wanted to helped him. 

She looked at her dress. Here, she knew, those who commanded the violence she’d just survived could not tolerate the appearance of it. Here, a woman with blood soaked through her dress was a class traitor, but a woman with genocide in her heart would easily become a master’s favorite dog.

_They cut their teeth in the jungle._

Aesis breathed. _She needed to know why she was there, what it had to do with Sephiroth._ Unless this monster’s ultimate goal was a to drown her in the glib, the callous and the superficially charming, something must have happened to him that night. She needed new clothes. She needed a shower.

Braced for tragedy, she was unsure what to make of the fortunate series of events that put her swiftly in the path of hygiene and couture; improbable, but satisfying. The dress she found tucked inside a performer’s afterparty wardrobe was sleek black, leather panels under the sensual brush of translucent silk paneling, all surrounding a welded brass bustier molded in harsh, asymmetrical shapes. _It was armor, death and sex,_ she smiled, _art imagined in a time of war; the cloistered brass and raw of the violence they wrought, the feral that brought her through it… the war itself was preserved in that dress._

It would fit like a glove.

* * *

Dragging the dress through Shinra’s ventilation system marked the end of her lucky streak. She stifled a groan, pulling her skirt out of the way as she twisted to stop the brass of her bustier from scraping against the metal of the shaft. She saw a grid ahead, a vantage point, and heard voices. Baritone, tensed; _Sephiroth,_ she recognized. _Genesis._

He was poised at the window, his face painted in soft moonlight that glowed in contrast to tensing muscle in his jaw. Hard eyes, warrior’s eyes, silence whose choking pressure was masked by the cutting lines of his posture and the gleam of his regalia. He searched his own reflection for words, and as he did, she saw a parcel in his hand, wrapped in paper. A present. He spoke softly, too softly for her to hear, and handed the gift to Genesis.

Aesis felt the cold breeze of air pass through the ventilator shaft, amplifying the chill of the metal and brushing goosebumps along the exposed skin of her arm.

“Infinite in mystery,” Genesis replied, taking the parcel. “What is this?”

It was a first edition of Loveless, leather-bound; she saw black ink, strokes of delicate calligraphy and wondered if it was the author’s own.

“A consolation prize,” Genesis murmured. “This could not have been cheap.”

“It wasn’t,” the other man nodded, then added: “Genesis, you asked me once to know my passion. My purpose,” Sephiroth gestured to the door, in the direction of the pomp and circumstance of the scene around them, toward its muted and sequestered sounds. He turned back to his friend; the heat in his gaze pierced the moonlight as it caught in the lengths of his hair. “I do not think I will find those things out there.”

Genesis swallowed.

“Easy to say, from where you stand, my friend” he whispered, his eyes fixed on the leather binding; Genesis’ finger brushed its spine. He breathed, “You must have such a different view.”

As Genesis turned to leave, he turned and let his hand still against Sephiroth’s arm. She wondered if she’d seen the wetness of a tear glisten in his eyeline; _perhaps it was just the light._

Genesis whispered, “Thank you.”

* * *

She slipped into the main ballroom in time to hear the same voice she’d heard mocking Sephiroth in the parking lot intone, _General, it is an esteemed pleasure._

Aesis grabbed a glass of champagne and tried to keep her reaction from reaching her face before the alcohol did. She saw the portly man, his neck bursting like choked sausage from the collar of an otherwise exquisitely tailored suit, approaching Shinra’s three most elite SOLDIERs.

She wasn’t sure what the man, who she quickly deduced was Genesis Sr., had said, not precisely. She heard some muttering about accomplishment, and then Genesis’ entire demeanor changed. A dark cloud settled over his eyes, his teeth flashed. The force of his glare, however, did not land on his father; the look he gave Sephiroth was the embodiment of hatred. Aesis' breath caught; that look seemed also the embodiment of desire. It was devouring.

The portly man changed the subject immediately; he looked behind him in her direction and before Aesis knew what was happening, she realized he was pointing at her. His finger curled. _Genesis Sr. was summoning her._ Aesis stood in place and stared at him, but she’d already walked closer than she realized. As Sephiroth’s gaze passed over her, she looked away. Her stomach dropped.

_That bastard had volunteered her to be his son's beard by proxy.  
_

_The entitlement was as enraging as it was quotidian._

It should have been. Her rage was precariously absent; she was _acquiescing._

“It would be my pleasure,” Sephiroth said, eyes lingering on Genesis for another moment before he numbly turned to her. Genesis sneered and walked away, Angeal not far behind him. Sephiroth spoke with a rehearsed monotone to which pleasure was entirely foreign; his willingness seemed a concerted effort to escape Genesis’ father more than anything, or perhaps an effort to distract himself from Genesis’ anger. Aesis was at a loss; where she would have normally just turned around and walked away, she found herself going along _nervously_. _Stay on mission, Commander Aesis,_ she reminded herself, then realized she had no idea if she was on mission or not. No hatred, no rage, again, she felt off the ground. She looked away from him as they stepped into the dance floor, but her efforts to hide her eyes were unnecessary. He wasn’t looking at her, his brooding gaze was a mile away as he absentmindedly muttered something about not dancing.

Violins interrupted him, sharp overtures sounding over the grit of electronic beats. The ballroom seemed transported; that waltz she’d expected fell away and for a moment, and Aesis was in the bars of the slums, where people danced with a fire that could exorcise the devil. The music, and perhaps the aggravation if his disinterest, compelled her to move; Aesis stepped into the undulations of a tango. It was her feet, the brush of her heel against the smooth floor of Shinra’s ballroom as she moved with effortless and exacting brutality between his legs, it was the brazen, punishing sensuality of her hip against his hand, that caught his attention. He realized, in an instant, that she was fighting him.

Sephiroth looked in her eyes and his own narrowed in threat.

“Those eyes."

 _She wanted that,_ Aesis realized. _Contact. Fuck Aesis, you idiot._ “The Wutian,” his words held steady, but a growl escaped him and his grip on her arm became a sudden, bruising force. The resemblance of their eyes did not seem to compel him to gentleness; on the contrary, he had judged her an enemy, and what they shared seemed only to compound the aggression her presence pulled from him. Air escaped her; he was pulling her closer, twisting into an overture to hand-to-hand combat in the music and candlelight, an overture that folded easily into the flow of their movement.

She felt the roughness of his touch and hit back; to her relief, her anger returned.

"Hey now," Aesis deadpanned. "Do you have any idea what it took to get into this dress?"

She hissed as he twisted her arm; she let the force of his movement send her flying out and back again, landing with her leg wrapped around his thigh, the edge of her forearm against his throat; Sephiroth pushed her arms back; their lines stretches into an aesthetic interpretation of the violence at their fingertips. The artistry of the dance itself was more hers, but he met her with power designed to conquer, he moved her with force that left her gasping.

They were, she realized, just avoiding a real fight; this was an interpretation in movement of the rage. _An interpretation of desire?_ He wasn’t blowing her cover. They stepped back, the frames of their body held like steel in the tension. “How did you get through security?” he snapped. Red light passed around them.

“What security?” She smirked.

“Hm,” Sephiroth’s lip curled. He pulled her closer.

“You don’t belong here.”

Aesis caught a glimpse of glaring eyes in the crowd; when she looked, they were out of focus, shifting away from her gaze.

She wrapped her fingers around his hand; forcing his grip to loosen, she rubbed the edge of her index finger along his white, silk glove, a wisp of clean fabric that could not conceal the hard surface of his calloused palm.

“You think you do?”

Sephiroth scowled, he snatched his hand away. He stepped forward, pushing her back; her legs cut the air between them and he seized her waist, pulling her close again.

"I hope not," he replied. They spun.

“I’m here for you,” she admitted. “ I think something is going to happen tonight, something that hurts you.”

“Hm,” he growled in response, his voice low in his chest; he thoughts were on Genesis. “You may be too late.” Sephiroth glared, catching himself. Her words, though spoken with sympathy, could have easily been a threat. He returned with menace, “You would be a fool to attack me tonight, Wutian.”

“You mistake my meaning, General,” she sneered. “I’m here to protect you.”

He stared. "You say that," he whispered, his jaw tensing. "Yet with you, Wutian, I feel a threat like no other."

Aesis replied, “If you’re not going to call me my name then you can call me _Commander_.”

He looked at her for a moment longer; his expression was inscrutable.

Somewhere, a clock rang to mark the hour. _Midnight_. Shadow overtook the ballroom for an instant; when it lifted, the doors to a veranda marked _off-limits_ glowed, traced by red light.

“It’s here,” she breathed. “I have to go.”

“Wait,” Sephiroth clenched his jaw. He felt her full strength as she pulled her hand from his grasp and ran.

Aesis cleared the veranda just as the sky around it split; it was a rupture in time. A miasma of billowing shadows and red light swirled around her. Images came into focus as a force picked up, dragging her into the fractured sky. Aesis held out her hand; the idea came swiftly and she wonder why she’d never thought of it before: Time magic. As eyes, teeth, the nebulous outline of a shifting beast lurched forward from the ether, the monster, the force, stopped. Aesis walked up to the rupture in time. She looked in. 

She saw herself as a child, thirteen in a cage, beside her, Mari; Aesis’ breath caught. Next to Mari, she saw silver hair flash. _Seven._ Her eyes widened. _Sephiroth._ He was there. He was _then._

“Maybe they know how to do the treatment now,” Mari was saying, “Maybe we’ll make it out of here.” She watched herself lean her cheek against iron bars, close to Mari’s shoulder, and Aesis’ hand lifted to her chest. “You and me,” she recited softly as she heard her teenage self murmur the same words, “to the end.” Her eyes were wet.

She saw a reflection stretching in the mirror of her cage; that demonic glare, that sinister smile. _The monster was attacking the Orphanage._ “No!” she screamed out. Then: “I know what you’re doing. I know what why you’re dragging me there.”

She heard a cackle; the red light, the hatred was closing in. Her spell was fading.

As Sephiroth turned the corner, running into the abandoned veranda, the shadow hit. He watched it envelope her and saw sparks fly as she struck its teeth; red materia bezelled in her earring glowed as her sword became molten steel. Aesis deflected another strike and plunged the tip of her sword into the beast’s nebulous form. She gritted her teeth, pushing the blade forward.

“How dare you,” she yelled. The sound came from her depths, like the roar of a mother bear.

The monster's wound began to glow, red light cracked through the dark patina of its shadow, splitting open its form as its depths caught flame. It reeled and lurched backward. Aesis’ eyes narrowed; she chambered her leg and kicked forward, sending the monster, and herself, flying into the cut in time.

As she was pulled into darkness, the last thing she heard was Sephiroth’s voice.

“Wait!”

* * *

In the Orphanage, Sephiroth sat in his cage, leaning the awkward length of his adolescent torso against iron bars. He listened to One sing Mari to sleep; her voice faded to an inaudible whisper, then returned in its simple melody.

“What does it mean?” He asked when she was done.

“It’s a song from a father to his daughter …” He watched the corner of her eye glisten in the hazard lights. “… He describes all the good she’s brought to his life, he says that um, you can destroy everything that gives you pleasure, and she has only to open her arms to rebuild it, that….” One coughed and looked away, fighting back tears. Her voice wavered. “That she must have fought all the wars, to be as strong as she is today, all the wars of life, and of love.”

“That’s beautiful,” he said, pressing his lips together. “How do you know Wutian?”

“I don’t know,” For a moment One’s eyes flashed with concern, as if she was unsure of his intention in asking, then she shrugged. “The only thing I remember before this was being on the streets of Midgar, I was looking for, um, Leaf House in the Sector 5 slums. I don’t even remember what that is. I remember Tseng’s face,” she shook her head. “That’s the Turk who grabbed me.”

He nodded.

“I think I’d been out on the streets for a while; it was bad but… I wanted to be there.” She looked at him. “Wherever I’m from, I don’t think I want to know any more than that.”

“Then you don’t know who you are either,” he whispered, feeling a tug in his chest.

“I guess not,” she said faintly. “Did you ever fight to protect someone you don’t even know?”

“Yes,” Sephiroth replied quietly, looking at her.

“What about you?” She asked. “You don’t know who you are?”

“I— I think I’ve always known who I am not. Before, I was in a… fighting school. When I was with others I felt sometime as if I was a mute foreigner in my own mind… All I knew of myself was violence,” his reconnection to that time cracked his voice; “I thought that my existence was different, special. The boys in… the, uh, dojo… were all so much older, they were _so loud_ but never seemed to say anything… real. They were dullards,” he sneered. “but they were all well-versed in a language I was not. They mocked me, called me “robot”… They told me I wasn’t human.” Sephiroth pressed his lips together. "I'd never thought of it before, but I think that crushed something in me."

One winced, a faint, wistful tug on her lips that seemed a gentle touch against his sadness. Then: “When you were with them, did you say things like _dullards_?”

Sephiroth scowled.

“I’m sorry,” One squeezed his arm. “Hm,” Sephiroth chuckled. “I read books with that language; I enjoyed it. It seemed challenging, poetic, it seemed to hold nuance.” Sephiroth scoffed. "They assumed I felt superior to them, but I had just been alone... always. They never asked me. And I said nothing."

“Hm. Then we’re both different,” One pulled her knees under her chin. “We both can’t be what they want us to be.”

“A pair of odd ducks,” he whispered.

One smiled. “Odd ducks.”

* * *

Aesis sent the monster flying from the cage where her younger self and Sephiroth were fighting it, and was snapped back into darkness. Time opened up again; she saw grey, almost clinically bare walls and furniture; she glimpsed sterile modern furniture, and then a remarkably decorated white coat, covered in medals, discarded distinction, draped over the edge of a chair cut from steel and black leather. _A general’s uniform._

He had his naked back to her; she saw lengths of silver hair move and realized he was pacing, and that next to him— _It was Genesis._ She was in Sephiroth’s apartment. A penthouse suite in Shinra building.

“I do not want your pity,” Genesis snapped.

“Genesis, I did not think—”

“—No,” the other man interrupted, not gently; his rage leaked through his seams in accusation. “You didn’t think.” Aesis fell back, the sounds muted, the shapes blurred; when she returned she saw Genesis slam the door behind him. She fell, as if through Sephiroth ceiling, square on his living room floor.

Sephiroth blinked, turning his attention from the sound of Genesis’ heated departure to the apparition in front of him. “You,” he sneered. “How are you doing this? How are you here _now?_ ” He stepped to close the distance between them, she saw his forearm and blocked, jumping back. “Still working on the details of that,” Aesis gasped.

“Get out,” he growled.

She felt a change like lightning through him as he grabbed her, throwing her into the drywall, ripping off her mask; she felt her head slam back, felt pressure on her throat. He was leaning into her, pressing her against his shattered living room wall. His leg came forward in a lunge, driving silken textures and violent pressure between her thighs, his hand was on her neck. Aesis had pulled his thumb away, breaking his choke at its weakest point, giving herself enough room to breathe. She’d drawn her sword, as she took in air she scraped the skin beneath his Adam’s apple. Sephiroth stopped immediately. "Hmph," he snorted.

It was over in the space of a single breath; the final step of their dance ended in a draw. She stared at his throat, impossibly close to her blade.

"You missed a spot shaving," it came out breathy, it came out dangerous, words like cold fire.

He tried to overwhelm her grip on his thumb; when the strength of his joint could not overtake the force of her hold, he pulled her closer before he could stop himself. In an instant, his rage had denatured, turned to hunger; something he barely knew overtook him. Something violent, something untenable, something that pulled his sight to the darkest corners of his own mind, to hellfire, to murder, to treacherous depths.

Aesis gasped, “Is this about fighting me, or fucking me?”

She could feel his breath, his heat against the exposed skin of her neck; his upper lip curled into something between a snarl and a smile, his lower lip hung with abandon to show his teeth. He looked like a wild animal. Aesis studied him intently, intensifying the pressure of her blade against his throat just enough to remind him that she too had fangs. He remembered himself enough to speak; the disconnection between his reason and the force surging in his body was remarkable.

“I should arrest you.”

His weight shifted forward; he pushed his leg deeper between her thighs. Aesis caught a moan in her throat and looked up at him.

“I don’t think you answered my question.”

For a moment, as he leaned into the edge of proximity her sword would allow, she thought he was going slice his own throat open to kiss her. Or bite her. Instead, Sephiroth growled and ripped himself away, leaving her standing with her dress tossed around her thighs, her head thrown back into the broken drywall; he watched the softness of her chest against the sharp edges of her bustier as she took a deep breath. Aesis looked at him.

“You’ve always been like this, haven’t you?”

“Have I?” Sephiroth snapped.

“Am I special?”

“You bring something out of me that is…” Sephiroth shook his head. When he looked at her, his eyes seemed lost; at the same time their light cut through her, direct and chilling. “Even in the most terrible battlefields, even in... I've only tasted what it is that I feel when I see you. You bring something up from the depths of me,” he glared. “And every time, Wutian, you survive it.” He whispered, "Not many would." He was back now, more himself; he was as afraid of what lay within him as he'd been seduced by it a moment earlier; he pushed his curiosity, pushed away the animal her serpentine eyes, cracking green through cement, stirred in him.

She glared.

“Commander,” he corrected after a moment, realizing the source of her irritation.

“Mm hm,” she replied, satisfied. “Your longing. Your hatred.”

“What do you know of it,” Sephiroth turned away.

"The past two minutes have been an impactful education." Aesis cracked her neck, her gaze settled on him, ostensibly unimpressed .

“Is that who I am?” He found himself wondering aloud. “Passion and purpose lost to enraged hunger, to a hateful heart. A _cold_ heart.” He should his head, letting his hair obfuscate her view of his face. “Why am I talking about this,” he muttered, "with a Wutian... spy?"

“A friend," she repeated. "And I don’t believe that,” Aesis stepped forward. “A cold heart, when your priority, on a night like this, was that the man you love feel cherished?” Sephiroth’s eyes narrowed; for a moment he looked ready to attack. Then he sighed. “Hmph. I cannot hide from you.”

“Not particularly well,” she affirmed drily.

“Then you must know it did not work,” was all Sephiroth could say, turning to face the window. He spoke to his own reflection, as if only to himself, where he knew his inarticulacy retreated more easily; still, his eyes lingered on her form in the glass. “When I try to _cherish_ him, I hurt him.” He profited from the release she gave his tongue, “When I cherish him I feel as though I’m made of poison.” Sephiroth closed his eyes; it was spilling out of him. What was in his heart was not sensitive material, he thought, unless he considered the perspective that he himself was nothing but the property of the Shinra corporation. _Was he giving Wutian intelligence an upper hand, facilitating espionage? Was he betraying Shinra? Did he want to?_

 _Another thought he could not allow;_ he bounded off of it, remembering his orders, loyalty, fraught though it was. His posture steeled; he turned to face her with cold eyes.

“Perhaps that’s why I’m here,” Aesis' demeanor softened. “I thought it would be someone else, but the man you hate tonight is yourself." She paused, searching for words. "You feel that way, but you’re wrong.” Her jaw clenched as the thought trailed off. “I felt that too. That I was poison.” There was something new in her mind, something she might have forgotten. “I used to feel that way all the time. Once, a friend told me that I was wrong. That this place is corrupt and degraded. He said that the people who have done this to us are the poison, not us.”

“Have done what to _us_?” His brow tensed. Aesis realized her mistake and sidestepped the question.

“My friend told me I was beautiful,” she continued, “Even in the darkest night, I’ve held onto that.”

“Hm,” he smirked. “You think I am beautiful?”

Aesis exhaled sharply; her eyes sparked as she answered: "You remind me of searing fire and cracking ice, Sephiroth, a wonder of nature on the edge of the world. And in all the hell in you, you can still love another person so tenderly. Yes, I think you’re beautiful.”

“Whoever you are, and whatever we have… shared…” his throat tensed; she watched him swallow to relieve it as his eyes bore into her own, “You are my enemy, you are wanted for the murder of Shinra SOLDIERs. My orders, _W_ _utian,_ are to execute you on sight.”

She scoffed, she looked ready to provoke him. Instead, she snapped: “Your soldiers were sadists. That was self-defense. I was _protecting_ myself from a war crime, I was protecting innocent women. ”

“My orders are legal,” he hissed.

“And immoral,” she growled back.

Sephiroth blinked, his hand strained forward as if to touch her cheek, tension gripped his fingers, pulling back, pressing against his duty, his animal, his longing; his touch was suspended in midair so close to her body she could feel the warmth of his hand.

“Get out of here,” he spoke low. “Go.”

She stepped back to the window ledge, drawing her sword. Sephiroth had turned away, his back to her.

“Aesis,” he closed his eyes and said her name as if the sound itself was forbidden _._ “I cannot see you again.”

“Your heart does not feel cold, Sephiroth.” Aesis replied.

He swallowed.

She heard rushing winds, and stepped out of the window, into abyss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have another illustration for this that I'll be adding later, but I didn't have time to finish the lines.  
> I did finish coloring the lines for Seph and Vincent in the cave in Contrapasso, pt. 3! You can find it [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25367281/chapters/64178311)  
> More illustrations and minor edits coming!


	13. Nibelheim Files, Episode 3: Fleurs de Nepenthe pt 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After a disastrous training session in the Orphanage, Sephiroth stays behind to help One train. The two bond, and Sephiroth confronts the ordeal of a hug. This is about as fluffy as I get, so I hope you enjoy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll write more here later. One last short update before a break! The next update will be on Monday 11/9. I need to recharge and focus on real life things, but in the meantime I'll work on illustrating more chapters and making minor edits to improve readability/cohesion. No plot changes. 
> 
> The song I've been mainlining for this is the Maya Jane Coles remix of Movement by Hozier. If Sephiroth had a more readily accessible ability to communicate, I imagine he'd sound a lot like Andrew Hozier writes. For One's side of things, I'd recommend Bones by MS MR. 
> 
> Young Sephiroth's appearance is inspired by artwork by [Boooshow](https://twitter.com/boooshow), which lives in my head rent free.

“The sword’s too big for you, girl.” Xavier smirked. “You’ll need both hands. Don’t worry,” he winked. “I’ll make it gentle.”

They were training.

The look in One’s eyes gave Sephiroth an uneasy smile; he had come to associate a more worn and confident iteration of that glare, Aesis’, with absolute annihilation. Still, he knew that this girl was facing an uphill battle; Xavier was right, the sword was too big for her. Its awkward fit required she start on the defensive; Sephiroth realized that for all the brutality of his early training, he had never been handed a sword that was sized badly enough to sabotage his performance. When the instructor blew his whistle, One sneered. She dodged Xavier’s strike and threw the weapon in the air in a fluid movement. She closed the distance to land a punch that cracked open the boy’s cheek and turned to catch the sword as it fell, twisting into the force to bring the blade against his own. Xavier hit the floor mat with slick slap and her sword, firm in her right hand, pointed at his throat.

“Don’t worry,” she sneered, “I’ll make it gentle.”

If there was a doubt in his mind that One was Aesis, it was gone now. Sephiroth understood where her artistry in blending street fighting into swordsmanship came from; it must have began as a necessity, an adaptation to a structure of training that was not meant for her. Her face was calm, but he saw her elbow shake. She’d pulled that strategy off barely; this time, her forearm couldn’t sustain the weight of the sword.

She released it completely when the rough edge of a thick rubber sole hit her arm; with a yelp of pain, One fell to the ground.

“You fight with the standards we require. You will respect this hierarchy,” the instructor sneered. “Don’t try that again, you can’t do it. He’s stronger than you.”

“Did he mean you physically can’t do that?” He heard Mari whisper, pressing her forehead to One’s for a moment as the latter sat beside her. “Does he have eyes?”

“Right?” One scoffed. “ _I can’t do that._ Motherfucker, I just did.”

Mari looked at her friend a second longer than he expected. “Be careful, One.”

“One! Mari!” For a second time, their instructor’s bite filled the air. “You two will stay behind to clean. Mari! Mop the hall, something tracked mud.” The instructor turned to the rest of them and spoke with less vitriol, “The rest of you have a free hour.”

Sephiroth stayed behind as the rest of the class left, helping.

“They treat her like shit.” She grumbled, collecting pads.

He looked confused. “He made you both stay.”

“Yeah, but I’m putting away people’s stuff. They make her do the janitor work,” One growled it through her teeth. “You would think they couldn’t find a way to make this any worse, but for her they always do.” She shook her head. “Always.”

One let her finger linger on a sword’s handle, considering. “I’m afraid one day she’ll hate me,” she whispered in its direction. “I’m afraid I’ll deserve it.”

Sephiroth frowned.

“You were resourceful today, One.” She looked at him in shock. She took a moment before answering him and replied, “Thanks.” He continued. “But they will punish emotional impulsivity in battle, even anger. They consider it a weakness.” One snorted. “You’re all so worried about how weak I am,” she glared at him. “Maybe the problem isn’t my anger, did you think of that? Maybe the problem is their fear.”

“Hm,” he smiled. “My _fear_ is that they will kill you.”

“You saw what happened today,” One propped the oversize sword in its holder; she needed both hands to do it. “If I follow their rules,” she shook her head, “then one way or another, they definitely will.”

“But if you act in anger, they will take it out on Mari, as well,” he observed softly.

One exhaled sharply, her eyes narrowed. “Mari fights for herself,” she answered sharply, then stalled out. “I—” she stammered, “how can I not be angry? They torture me. They humiliate me, they—” she looked away, cutting her sentence short. He felt a chill. “I can’t say what they do to me,” she finished. “I try _so hard_ , but I can’t live with it, with the anger, and do a good job protecting her. It breaks me apart. I can’t—"

Her fist hit the wall; One muffled a scream with her hand.

He waited a few moments. “I understand,” Sephiroth replied calmly, “and I think your anger is a problem.”

She glared at him, blowing on her cut knuckles.

Sephiroth considered. “You could develop what you did today,” he spoke thoughtfully. “if you haven’t thought of that already. Create your own style. If you fight well enough, eventually, they’ll concede. They will not respond to any moral sense,” he pressed his lips together, “but they will respond to power.”

One frowned. “If I develop my own style,” she countered, “their hits will keep coming.”

“Yes,” Sephiroth spoke with a flat tone, nodding. “You will have to be excellent. You will have to… survive.” He thought of Mari, remembering his conversation with Aesis.

 _Did he survive?_ He'd asked, referencing the person she had loved. The person he assumed was a boy.

_No one did._

He pushed the thought out of his mind and watched One nod, watched the caramel curls around her neck move. One pushed her hair out of her face and looked in his eyes with a terrible sort of resolve. “Will you help me?” She asked.

He was surprised, but didn’t let it reach his face. _Aesis would have never asked for his help,_ he thought, wondering what had changed in the years since this moment. Sephiroth merely nodded. One grabbed her sword off the wall and tossed it to him, choosing another. It was a symbolic gesture more than anything; her new sword was still too large.

He immediately imagined showing her to fight as Aesis did; it was daunting. He didn’t know how to teach the style One would eventually develop; even if he had mastered each of her preferred techniques, Aesis’ whole was greater than the sum of its parts. His eyes narrowed against a feeling of inadequacy; One had not yet mastered those techniques, and he could teach that, at least. But she was asking for help in finding her own style. Beyond mastery of form, how could he teach her what only Aesis could do?

In the end, he realized he couldn’t. He realized that wasn’t the point. She needed someone to bounce off of, he realized. A mastered sword to struggle against. As they playacted different scenarios, as he disarmed her within them, she improved on her own. Rapidly. She needed his feedback; she needed to know how her attacks impacted him, know the moments he saw openings in her defenses, know the moments she created them in his. She needed his encouragement, the competitive admiration that traced his eyes, rising naturally as he watched her. He lent his imagination to moments when the weight of the sword overwhelmed her, to a creative exchange that slowly overwhelmed the disadvantage that weapon gave. But he didn't need to teach One her own style. That, he realized, she could discover on her own. _No,_ she said, moving in rehearsal as he recommended his favorite combination. _That doesn’t feel right. It’s not right._ It didn’t take her long, in her body’s intuition, to find what did.

It left him wondering how much of her power had come from him; he could never confuse it with his own, yet he realized that something in him assumed a claim to her strength. _Did Aesis’ strength not come to her in an effort to replicate his? Was he not the aspiration. The inspiration?_

By the end of his free hour, they were sparring. Sephiroth smirked out from beneath the sharp ridge of his brow; his eyes narrowed in taunt. It was a well-rehearsed overture for him; he anticipated heat in that moment, that intimacy of terror in his opponent’s eyes, the rush of pride and power as he forced intimacy from them. When he smirked at One, he felt an energy so strong in its heat and fluidity that his own mind began to dull; he focused. He saw fear cross her eyes; nonetheless, there was something in her he could not quite claim, could not quite reach. She didn’t move; she didn’t even press her blade to his own, didn’t test his strength. He felt a rise of something sadistic; he felt a sudden, chasmic separation from her, he felt _hatred_ and offered a languid, chilling stare. Sephiroth lunged slower than he should have, he moved as if to toy with her. In retrospect, he should have known better.

It never occurred to him that she would rush him so quickly; he had fully anticipated that in her fear, she would show reserve.

He wasn’t sure how he could have missed it; all she’d done was fake left. Then her legs were around his neck, her full weight threatened to crush his throat unless he fell with her.

_Damn it.  
_

“Hm,” he smacked the mat, indicating surrender, and stood.

“That was bold. You cannot be arrogant.”

One looked like she was ready to hit him again. “That wasn’t arrogance,” she flashed proud eyes. “You thought I was too afraid to close right away.”

“Hm,” Sephiroth rubbed his jaw and smiled. “My own arrogance, then.” he paused. “Get out of my mind, One.”

Surprised at his introspection, she softened. “Alright,” She agreed; though she did not move physically, he felt the space between them harden. He felt lonelier.“Sev, how do you understand what I'm doing?”

“I knew someone who… reminds me of you. The way she fought was…” he paused. _Aesis fought the way fine wine smelled._ He immersed himself in the intoxication of memory, in the lethal beauty of orange brush strokes, red paints, of fire, a synesthetic representation of her unconfined by vocabulary, “… intuitive,” he tried. _She leaked through his senses,_ to translate the fullness of that was impossible _._ “Elegant, annihilating in its brutality.” Sephiroth shook his head, smiling. _Language made a mess of it._ “I can’t imitate it, but… She is a force of nature. Forged in circumstances like yours, I think. ”

“You liked her, this woman?”

Sephiroth smirked. “One,” he remarked, his voice becoming serious. “I realize that this power doesn’t come from me… from _Sephiroth_. It flows from you, even now. It… it is you.” Sephiroth realized what he wanted to say and nodded, looking away from her, to a spot on the wall that would be easier to speak to.

“When I fight, I get into people’s mind too, but it’s different. My ambitions are more… colonial. The intimacy of claiming their mind, the power of forcing that intimacy,” he swallowed. “It’s an aphrodisiac. It makes me feel… good… about myself. It’s terrible,” he shook his head, hand grasping for a light touch against his chest. “I sensed immediately there is something in you I can’t claim. I think _I_ felt inadequate, afraid, but I didn’t know it. I saw those things in you instead. I was ready to annihilate you. And I underestimated you.”

He looked at her and felt the shame. _Perhaps, if he used that terrible part of himself to help her, it would put something right._

“Shinra is like that,” he murmured, looking away. “Colonial, imperial, always. Maybe the same thing happens with these guards, these scientists… instructors…” He swallowed. “It must make them feel so… separate from you. So desperate to destroy you. I think that’s why they attack you, One, why they act to annihilate you. They can't... feel powerful... with you.”

One stared at him; her expression changed abruptly. He saw energy convulse through her body, as if her own heart had punched her the chest; she turned away with her hand over her mouth. When he saw her face again, he realize she was crying.

Sephiroth frowned. “Do you feel… sadness? Because of what I said?”

“Not everyone’s like this,” One explained, leaving him confused that she believed her power was shameful. “It’s not who I’m supposed to be.” She wiped her eyes. “They make me feel like I’m poison, and I don’t want to be the bad one. But I can’t be anyone else, and if I don’t push back I know I’ll die. I’m so confused. I’m so scared, Sev.” she was crying. “I’m so scared all the time.” She sniffed into the back of her hand. “It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make _sense._ Why can't they just let me be separate? Why do they hate me so much for something I can't control?" She took an uneven breath. "Why do they need _more_ power over me? I'm already in a cage!" One sniffed, "Maybe you’re right, maybe we are just abominations. Maybe that’s the only thing that makes any sense.”

“No. You’re not an abomination, Ae—” He caught himself again. “One. They will take everything, they cannot bear for you to have anything that is not theirs. They cannot _bear_ separation." Sephiroth closed his eyes, remembering how he had felt in thrall to Jenova's invasions. "They’re the poison, not you. They’re corrupted, degraded... They're broken. You…” He held out his hand, gesturing to the mat, wishing he could find the language. “You’re beautiful.” She looked at him, speechless.

She took his hand. He flinched; for a moment, he froze. Touch outside of combat set off a burst of adrenaline, nausea that wrapped Sephiroth’s stomach in knots; it had taken him years to steel through it on the rare occasion he was forced to accept a handshake, and he had never been able to escape the numbness that claimed his body afterward. But he was younger now, and he had not learned this. He had no practice at all, he realized, in accepting touch unedged with scalpels, unqualified with surgical steel.

 _…My sadness?_ His own voice in his mind. _What do I have to be sad about?_ The footprint of a memory, something he could not shake. His chest hurt.

He pulled his hand away and held onto One’s fingers at the same time; before he knew it, the tart smell of Shinra’s cheapest shampoo, the musky salt of her sweat surrounded him, he felt warmth against his cheek. He’d buried his head in the crook of her neck, his body acting without him, seizing the comfort it craved of her embrace. He wanted to run away, but couldn’t; for a moment, as her arms wrapped around him, he felt more thirteen than his own age. “I’m scared too,” he confessed, words muffled against her pulse. Terror swelled in him, he held her tighter. “I’m scared, and everything is so cold, it’s so sharp.” Sephiroth closed his eyes. “Sometimes I don’t know if I’m alive or dead. I’m so lonely. I’m so alone.”

“I— It’s okay, Sev. I’m here. You’re alive, you’re here.” He could tell she was taken aback, but she didn’t pull away; she leaned in to support his weight. Her hand was moving over his spine, warm touch on the nape of his neck, comforting him. Her fingers stroked his hair. A hot tear landed on his ear, her own; he felt his eyes water and couldn't hold them back as the vibration of her voice touched his cheek. “We’re your friends. We’ll… we’ll help you keep warm.”

He held onto her. Sephiroth didn’t know what to do next; he stayed in the paralysis of that indecision until she pulled away and stared, grey eyes, so large and piercing, searching him with the latent power of a storm cloud.

“It feels so real, it feels alive,” his voice was barely audible, he felt her skin on his. “This contact.”

“It feels like you’re willing to see me, understand my mind,” she whispered. “You let me be real. Thank you, Sev.”

It was strange to hear, uncomfortable to receive; he did it anyway. The faintest pink traced the edge of his cheeks as they flushed. Sephiroth nodded.

One winced, as though in pain.

She looked away, her fingers left his to brush her temple. _Her head hurt._

“ _Okay_ ,” she growled, rubbing.“That was also real.”

“Come on,” Sephiroth whispered. “Let’s get out of here.”  
  
That night, as he fought another wave of tears, Sephiroth rolled the bruised leaf of a weed plucked from the Orphanage's concrete between his fingers. He thought of Aesis' words as she tucked an equally resilient flower into his pauldron: _Imagine if life ever returned to this dead ground._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed! First up in illustrations is a finishing a sketch of the trio from the previous chapter, then I'll go through and draw Seph's memories. Links to each chapter will be here when I'm done with the drawings, so stop by if you'd like.
> 
> UPDATE: Chapter 12 has a new illustration of the ball! You can find it [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25367281/chapters/66205496)  
> UPDATE: Chapter 12 has a new illustration young Sephiroth in Wutai. There's some blood. You can find it [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25367281/chapters/66205496)  
> UPDATE: Chapter 11 is next! Sexiroth invading Wutai can be found [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25367281/chapters/65844016).  
> UPDATE: Sephgen is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25367281/chapters/65844016)


	14. Nibelheim Files, Episode 4: Original Sin, part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Torn away from the Orphanage and sent back into Sephiroth's memories, Aesis confronts the bloodiest day of the Wutian War and sees a new side of Crisis Core Sephiroth.  
> In Shinra Building, Scarlet considers evidence of Sephiroth's instability and plans for the future.
> 
> TW: Sex and violence. Gore. Themes of emotional, classist, racial and gendered abuse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I was toying with headcanons, and I started writing from Scarlet's perspective thinking it would be a one-off of a white, predatory woman who handles her own oppression by eating other people alive; think Christina from Lovecraft County with a human footrest. I started exploring her as a brilliant, competent and completely psychopathic human negotiating Shinra's patriarchy, and realized that she is twisted fun to write. I was a creatively compelling combination of seduced and disgusted; again, she's meant to be truly evil, but she's human, and creatively that's the good shit. Scarlet's gonna stick around, and as with most of the women (and Sephiroth, hi) in this game I'm going to explore her character in more depth than she gets in the game. I think I found my villain. 
> 
> For music recommendation: Love me some Me and the Devil by Soap&Skin for Scarlet, Holding Out for a Hero by Nothing But Thieves for Seph and Ae's confrontation (who's the hero?), and This is a Trick by Crosses for the whole chapter.

_“This is a warning, gentlemen. What happened on the coast this morning makes Vesuva pale in comparison.”_

_“You’ve failed, Hojo,” came Scarlet’s smug condemnation. “He was unstable then, and this circuitous route has taken us to more of the same.”_

_“You cannot attribute the Vesuvan massacre to—”_

_“—We still don’t know, my dear.” Hojo interrupted. Scarlet pursed her lips into a chilling smile as he spoke: “We don’t know if Vesuva was Sephiroth’s work. He was only twelve when he was there, and that was a power unlike what the boy has manifested since.”_

_“Until today.”_

_“Mr. President, he will win you your war. He is above and beyond the best the world has ever known… there is no doubt of that. That said,” Hojo chose his words carefully, “we don’t fully understand what happened today, and we still need my C protocols to elucidate what happened in Vesuva. I’ve begun development on a new monster from the Project C findings that I believe will help us achieve that goal, Sample-Ancient number 63—”_

_“Focus, Hojo” Scarlet interrupted. “After the bloodiest day of the Wutai War we’re saying that the legacy of this cooperation rides on a single unstable, genetically engineered super-SOLDIER. That is untenable, gentlemen.”_

_“Agreed,” President Shinra chimed in._

_Hollander’s deep bass filled the air, oppressive, decisive. “Despite the… high casualties… of the coastal incursion, his power is…” The scientist paused, his face folding into a toxic and unyielding pride that seemed to burn the air. “His power is unparalleled. I thought it would be worse.”_

_Heidegger’s angered expression was cloaked in shadow as he leaned forward, away from the warmth of a nearby desk lamp. He emerged with a deepened frown. “It’s unlike him. Why did he open such indiscriminate fire? Why did he disregard orders?”_

_“Genesis, I imagine,” Tseng answered. “And… there was unknown player on the field, a woman, possibly Wutian. We’re having… trouble with eye witness testimony. No one seems to remember her; those that do describe… Ifrit, an avenging ghost of their ancestors, that sort of thing. The only account we’ve confirmed is that at 11:23 today, he was with her on the beach, in a compromising position. If you flip to page forty-six, you’ll see the visual we secured of her, looking very… corporeal.” The room of Shinra Executives looked up, torn from their thoughts and coffee. Eyebrows arched, dossier pages turned to reveal a low-resolution black and white photo of a long-haired man’s torso as he held a woman’s naked chest to his own. Her arms appeared tight around his neck, wrapping him in a kiss; a second, her head tossed back, his lips below her clavicle. Hollander cleared his throat. President Shinra looked closer._

_“Her face is blurred out,” he said, after a pause. “She’s not Ifrit.”_

_With her red fingernail, Scarlet traced the scars that framed the woman’s breast._

__

_“The film,” Tseng glanced at Scarlet and continued, “was… damaged.”_

_“How?”_

_Tseng opened his mouth in exasperation and said nothing, waving his hand vaguely. “The woman left no trace,” he said finally. “We’ll liaise with R &D on clean-up.”_

_“You will liaise with me,” Scarlet interjected, in a tone that brooked no further argument or clarification._

_“What did Sephiroth say?”_

_“He was… not forthcoming. I didn’t press the issue.”_

_“Then make him—”_

_“—You make him.”_

_Scarlet sneered and tossed her dossier to the table for emphasis. “We’re speaking about something that has existed since its inception to be used to our benefit and discarded when it breaks. As you say, its power is unparalleled. There will be no greater threat to Shinra if Sephiroth defects or… chases his hormones to Wutai. Your weapon is broken, gentlemen. It broke in Vesuva and it broke today. We must discard it.”_

_“Are you foolish enough to hand Wutian troops that victory?” Heidegger interjected. “The execution of a loose cannon will destroy public trust in our army. The average citizen is frightened enough of SOLDIER; we cannot add this fuel to the fire.”_

_“Then we are talking about two problems. The first, to contain public response to the coastal incursion. The second is a long-term solution to the existential threat Sephiroth poses to our company. Hm.” Scarlett smirked. “Perhaps we can spin this, shift the narrative; we canonize Sephiroth as a hero, attribute the death toll to Wutian insurrection. The public will rally behind SOLDIER if we give them a hero.”_

_“That will give us the time we need to decide how to terminate him…” She paused to collect her thoughts, “while maximizing our return on investment. War heroes die all the time.”_

_“You cannot,’ Hojo interrupted. “You cannot eliminate Sephiroth. You will ruin decades of my research on Reunion theory. His use goes far beyond your victory over Wutai, Scarlet, surely you’ve managed to comprehend this by now.”_

_“Kya ha,” Scarlet laughed, flashing a smile that showed her teeth. “I am far from myopic, Hojo. I see the value of your science in securing our legacy and I see, as perhaps you do not, that this mutant of yours is a timebomb. There will come a time when it threatens our legacy more than it protects it.” Scarlett shook her head. “Sephiroth will be dealt with, there’s no question about that now. It will be on the President’s terms, not on yours.”_

_Her smile took on the annihilating quality of a woman who knew there would be no distinction between the president’s terms and her own; it was the smile of a puppet who had learned to guide her master’s fingers._

_President Shinra beamed._

_“She’s onto something,” he declared. “Scarlet, there’s no reason to be nervous. I’m sure we all understand your anxiety, don’t we, gentlemen?” Scarlett looked at him, momentarily jarred; she had not been anxious, she had not been nervous. Her breath caught, her pulse quickened; Scarlett’s eyes narrowed, bedroom eyes that nonetheless pierced lethal as she took a hand to her chest. “Mr. President,” she deferred._

_“We can spin this,” President Shinra continued, “Make him a war hero. Vilify Wutai for this massacre and galvanize public support for SOLDIER.”_ _The president chomped his cigar, nodding. “It will give us time to terminate Sephiroth while securing return on investment. I leave the science of that to you, Professor Hojo.”_

 _Scarlet nodded; she listened to her own words as they left the president’s mouth and complimented his ingenuity. President Shinra grunted in self-satisfied pride; For an instant, Scarlet wondered if she was completely empty, save the tenacious discomfort of her elevated pulse._

_Discomfort lingered. After the meeting, as the room cleared, she lifted a beckoning finger in her footstool’s direction and waited for the infantryman to crawl from his post; her anonymous employee approached her ankles, shaking tumescent muscle, shallow, nervous breaths, Scarlett looked at him. “Are you nervous?” She asked, and delivered a vicious kick that sent the infantryman yelping to the ground. Blood seeped between his fingers as he clutched the wound her stiletto left in his side. Her heart rate went down._

_Behind her, Hojo stared. “You can’t just—”_

_“Kya ha,” Scarlet laughed. “Please don’t pretend you haven’t done worst sixteen times today already,” she stepped closer to Hojo. “And don’t pretend, Hojo, that you’ve ever worried anyone will hold you accountable for it.” She smirked. “I answer only to the President, and for that Faustian bargain, I CAN. Just.” She spoke slowly, savoring the words as they moved on her tongue, and studied Hojo’s expression. “Do not underestimate a woman who sells her soul for power in a man’s world, Hojo; you cannot even imagine the reach of my violence. Now. I think I’ll go make your prized pet famous,” she pursed her lips. “Fame is a… powerful narcotic on the path to annihilation; enjoy these fifteen minutes. They will not last.”_

_“You’re so sure you can eliminate him. He is without weakness,” Hojo snapped._

_“Is he?” She chuckled, lifted one of the photographs from her dossier. “You must not see anything in our hard-earned military intelligence besides a million gil write-off in amateur porn. Mm,” she smirked. “Whoever this woman is, with her he is a man without armor, in every imaginable sense. Your pet monster yearns to be consumed in connection with another, the same way a condemned man yearns for grace. If you want to destroy it, Hojo, THAT is its weakness.” She watched the fear, the condemnation, in Hojo’s eyes, and smiled. “I’ve told you; do not underestimate my violence.”_

_Scarlet turned away.  
  
“I will anticipate your plans to terminate…” She scoffed, turning at the exit on her red-soled heel. “Him,” she intoned, emphasizing her distain. “I suppose for the sake of press briefings, I’ll refer to Sephiroth in more polite terms.” Hojo stared blankly. “If there is any military value to this new specimen-ancient whatever of yours, then I expect your reports on Project C immediately. Off you go to your little experiments.” _

_She spoke to a nearby waiter; a tall black woman whose midnight skin seemed to pull out the cool undertones of the room’s shadows, as if they too wished to flee, whose jaw steeled to conceal her fear and the punch of her disgust as the infantryman collapsed in her peripheral vision, bleeding. Scarlet smiled, flashing bleached canines in the glow of a lamp._ _She spoke softly._

_“Clean it up.”_

* * *

Her head hit something.

Hard.

Arches of limestone descending into monumental sea cliffs, rising out of rolling mist like Leviathan from the depths. The hostile coast of Wutai at dawn, with a vertical drop-off, hundreds of feet into jagged rocks and black sand beaches below.

Aesis reached to the back of her skull and felt something wet. Blood. Her fingers reflexively touched her chest plate, her materia; _it was there._ Aesis was back in her armor. Near unconscious in a war zone.

“That’s dirty pool,” she grumbled, in case the monster was listening, rubbing the cut on her head and pulling to a crouched position. The cacophony was coming into focus; she felt the sudden touch of air moving and ducked as an artillery shell cut through the rock above her, rolling out from underneath the debris. _Wutai at dawn. Wutai at war._

_Shinra’s coastal incursion._

She was back.

“Goddamn it,” Aesis hissed, looking out over the battlefield. _Why couldn’t she stay in the orphanage?_

She didn’t know the sequence of events that must have transpired that morning, didn’t know the series of misfortune and error that built up to the conclusion she was witnessing; it was clear something had already gone very wrong. The melee, she recognized from the Com Sim. On her left, amid a sea of carnage, dying warriors and fleeing civilians caught where they should not have been, silver hair moved; Sephiroth was turning, cutting down an insurgent’s magic in an effort to protect a fallen infantryman. On her right, she saw a Wutian civilian, mortally wounded, who had dragged what remained of his body to a fallen rocket launcher. That man shouldn’t have been alive, much less mobile, that man was a civilian. _Impossible._ She wouldn’t have turned in time, and neither did Sephiroth.

Aesis yelled, lifting her hand in reflexive defense.

The white light of her barrier flew in Sephiroth’s direction at the same time a streak of red closed the distance to the Silver General, pushing him out of harm’s way. _Genesis._ The rocket exploded.

She saw the luminescence of her magic cover Genesis’ form in the instant before the detonation overtook them. Shrapnel flew, cutting underneath Sephiroth’s pauldron; he flew forward from the impact and landed on his feet. The Red Commander did not; _he should be stunned_ , Aesis though; with the barrier she was sure he was alive. Genesis’ words crossed her mind: _If a man pushes his General out of destruction’s inimitable path…_ Aesis breathed, negotiating her position in time. When she’d first arrived in Sephiroth’s memories of Wutai, she’d seen the end of this day. _Now,_ she realized, _she was seeing the beginning. The ground incursion, the morning insurgent attacks resulted in the greatest number of civilian deaths of any single day of the Wutian war._ She braced, scanning the melee for the face of the Wutian insurgent she'd fought again and again in the Com Sim, the Wutian culpable for killing his own people. He wasn't where she remembered him.

To her shock, Sephiroth did not run to his friend. Instead, he turned to the cluster of Wutian civilians, to a woman clutching her terrified child. She held a boy about ten, turning the child’s head away into her breast, stroking hair and begging, sobbing in terror. His hand moved. Aesis felt her jaw go lax; for a single instant, as the mother and her child froze in halting time, preserved in their expression, Aesis though Sephiroth had missed. Her mind was reeling. _It was incomprehensible._

Aesis felt as though her feet were off of the ground, she felt her stomach drop. She remembered Junon. She remembered the moment she realized her comrades, her trainers, her company had ordered her execution. The fabric of reality seemed torn; freefall through betrayal that seemed to defy the laws of physics. The fact that Sephiroth had not betrayed _her,_ the fact that it did not have anything to do with _her_ , was lost on her.

She did not hear Hojo’s words as they echoed in Sephiroth’s mind; as he watched Genesis fall, Sephiroth was consumed in his memories of Hojo’s cruelty: _your mother died giving birth to you… you’ve always been an adequate killer._ Aesis did not understand how Hojo’s epitaph had convinced Sephiroth immediately and without proof that Genesis was dead; she did not understand how Hojo’s epitaph filled him with certainty that once again, he had killed the one he loved.

She did not understand the psychic alchemy, the twisted double jeopardy, that brought Hojo’s murderous condemnation to life in Sephiroth’s soul; she did not understand the reflexivity with which his self and soul dissolved to escape the shame of it. The wounds those words left in him cut through reason, through training, through any notion of what he stood for.

He turned to the civilians standing where the rocket had launched; his memories were like sand through his fingers and a cauterizing rage flooded his veins. Suddenly, Sephiroth saw Genesis’ murderer everywhere he looked. Paranoia reared. Paranoia. Certainty, without proof. Murderous rage.

_Of course he didn’t miss._

As time moved forward, merciless and unrelenting, as the eyes of that woman deadened and her body fell apart on blood-soaked earth, Sephiroth pushed her screaming boy aside and stepped toward the surviving civilians. “You try to use your children as shields?” His eyes narrowed.

_You are cold, Sephiroth, by the goddess, cold and almighty._

Genesis’ words made more sense to her now.

A voice from the crowd begged in Wutian, cried their innocence, as their soldiers closed in to defend them.

“Liar,” he growled.

The civilians screamed. Fire exploded around them, cutting through what remained in the Wutian line, consuming the people in its path. The sheer breadth of destruction knocked air from Aesis’ lungs; flames cut through the battlefield and ripped apart the nearby town. No one moved, no one tried to stop him; no one was strong enough to stop him. She leapt from her limestone refuge, her mind racing. Her own fear, her own mounting fury. The thought of fighting Sephiroth physically ached her, the risk of irrevocably altering a timeline was unknown. There were so many reasons not to move, to watch the horror play out. Perhaps Genesis would have regained consciousness. Perhaps Sephiroth would have come to his senses.

It didn’t matter. She was running, flying. Aesis was who she was; war, redemption, the undercurrents of her revolution and justice roared in her mightily. She felt tears in her eyes spring from a mess of motivations: ancient fury from her own execution that made that mother’s exquisitely personal, a desperation to protect Sephiroth’s humanity from his hatred even as her own bellowed, a desperation to protect her people.

“Sephiroth,” she cried out, “ _STOP!_ ”

The way he turned, body and senses coiling, alive, reminded her of an animal. Their blades crossed.

 _“Wutian,”_ he growled, his eyes narrowing in recognition of the ghost of her, the familiarity of her, a memory that had taken root in his mind over her journey through time. She seized him like a sharp whisper of cold air against his neck, a gravitational center around which his hatred could move. Move it did. It swelled. “You,” he sneered. “Your eyes… I don’t know you. How—?”

“I wouldn’t think too hard about time travel,” she muttered.

He yelled out and lunged. _Commander._ In the urgency of the moment, he imagined he might be recalling some detail from an intelligence briefing. He wondered if the attack that brought down Genesis had been her order; as the breath of his hatred and suspicion converged onto her he roared:

“You did this.”

He was accusing her of everything, everything that was, everything that had been. She felt the timelessness of it.

“No,” Aesis parried, partially mistaking his meaning; she didn’t realize Sephiroth thought Genesis was dead; in the quagmire, he was also accusing her of his love’s death. “ _You_ are _doing_ this,” she pointed to the utterly obvious. “The explosions, the bloodiest day in the Wutai War. It wasn’t Wutian insurgence that killed these people. It was you.” Her accusation cut his confusion like a surgeon’s blade, a prognostic instrument, blunt and without compassion: “They left hell in you.” Aesis exhaled. Her eyes glanced the sight of a burning leaf falling, its smoldering edge glancing along the finger of that mother’s hand, still wrapped in loose strands of her child’s hair. The boy, covered in blood, was being dragged away; Aesis saw his mouth move to cry as he reached for his mother, but could not hear him. “I didn’t see this in you,” she shook her head and spoke gently. “Sephiroth, please stop. This will destroy everyone, this will destroy you … I don’t want to fight you.”

Softer than he could hear, she whispered, “I don’t want to lose you.”

He smirked, watching her closely. Her stomach tightened; a switch flipped in her mind. Aesis recognized the fight coming and sneered while she gathered herself.

“I will not let you butcher my people.”

She drew her sword.

She felt his presence invading her as the dominion, the degradation of his colonial energy filled her mind. His cold smirk, those burning, piercing eyes, undone in his effort to invade her. Made animal.

He lifted his hand. His choice was clear.

Aesis made a calculation. She lowered hers.

She thought his overture would be an explosion; a ploy to put her in her place as another faceless enemy; she thought it would be a ploy to burn her eyes and the connection they offered him out of her skull. It was. She took the hit unshielded, her heart in her stomach. Flames overtook her; the might of his magic moved under her skin. The might of hers split the sky apart. White light overtook them, the flames fueled her as the steel of her sword cracked into its primordial form; as if pulled anew from the forge, Saya blazed. _His fire was hers._ Aesis pulled the inferno to her and commanded the few surviving civilians run, orders swiftly obeyed; the air hummed, turned red as she directed the full might of Sephiroth’s explosion to obscure the field between them. The split sky came together in flame. In her power, the Wutian dawn became a crucible of fire.

He was on her battlefield now.

Through a column of smoke, Aesis leapt into Sephiroth’s view. She saw a slight widening of his eyes, the only thing that betrayed his shock.

For an instant, as he watched Aesis traverse burning air, watched the edge of her blade angle in his direction, impossibly, inexplicably, he heard her voice in his mind.

_I’m here to protect you._

Sephiroth narrowed his eyes.

He had all lost sense of who she was; she became his mother, his enemy, himself, all at the same time. He had lost all sense of where she began, where he ended; as the unconquerable in Aesis catalyzed madness within him, his pride swelled in the sense that there was no traitorous protector he could not destroy. No mother he could not destroy. In the moment, the horror of that was lost to him, but the power it implied was not. No one could protect themselves from him; no one was strong enough. Yet he was permanently hurt. He was permanently shamed. He was never safe.

_I’m here to protect you._

Sephiroth readied his hand around Masamune’s hilt and smiled. He meant murder. He thought, _protect yourself._

As he stepped into the fire, somewhere deep within him, a part of him still hoped that she could.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So in this episode, I'm ending the journey to the past by shifting into my Sephiroth headcanons. The first is that, if he was as unstable as he was in Nibelheim, it wouldn't have really happened out of the blue. I think he would have shown evidence of instability in the past, there would have been red flags, and Shinra might have looked the other way at first but eventually the threat to the company would have been so great I think they would have started developing a contingency plan. That leads into my second handcanon, borrowed from a beautiful story on Tumblr I can't find but will link to if I do, that his fame was part of a cover-up. In this story, it is deliberately engineered by Scarlet to cover-up a massacre of Wutian civilians.
> 
> My third headcanon for my (our?) husbando is that believing his mother died in childbirth, coupled with the trauma of being such a powerful child soldier, would have played a huge role in his breakdown. In the end, deep down, I think he would have just felt evil, and when he starts to question whether or not he's abominable, he goes crazy. My headcannon is that's why he's so obsessed with Cloud, and one of the reasons why he's in love with Genesis; he gets some sense of safety around ~~people~~ men who stand up to him. I developed Aesis to be able to fight him as well, I felt like that needs to play out with real stakes. I don't want it to go the way it does with Cloud, though, because I never want their relationship to become abusive. I wanted it to be real, and unreal, at the same time *smiles in diva* so having her fight a past Sephiroth while the present one is processing his emotions in a different time is my solution to that problem.
> 
> Up next: How do we get from a fight to the death on Wutian cliffs to naked on the beaches below? Is it healthy? (it isn't) Is it sexy? (I mean) Find out next week! We migghtt also find out what happened to Aesis and Mari in the Orphanage.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed it! Thank you for reading!


	15. Nibelheim Files, Episode 4: Original Sin, part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aesis and Sephiroth fight it out in an epic battle (tm) that is probably WAY too psychological but ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ you get what you pay for.  
> As the fight comes to a head, at the edge of murder and desire, they must both make critical choices about who they are.
> 
> TW: Graphic depictions of violence and explicit sexual content, gore. This chapter is meant to to illustrate the cycle of violence, and while it ends differently than it would in an abusive context the entire plot structure of the chapter comes with that warning on it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While I was brainstorming for this chapter, I can across this headcanon from [sword of](https://swordof.tumblr.com/post/635003297350172672/head-canon-sephiroth-is-severely-bipolar-and) on tumblr that Sephiroth is severely bipolar. I love this idea and ran with it to shape my own thoughts; for me he's having a psychotic break, and I tried to incorporate elements of mania, as well as paranoia. When he loses love, especially where death and betrayal are involved, here the psychic fragility Seph showed in Nibelheim is not a one-off. In this, though, there's more of him left without Jenova's influence. How will he cope? Here's my stab at it. 
> 
> For this, from Aesis' perspective of the fight I'd recommend Queen of Peace by Florence + the Machine, for Seph's, God be You by Nostalghia (holy shit. I feel like this song would be top five in crazy!seph's playlist). For the beach scene, the acoustic version of Human by Rag'n'Bone Man.

_He didn’t talk._

It was the absoluteness of it that surprised her; the way language appeared utterly severed from his physicality, from his lethality. From his rage. _It was rage_ , though it was delivered in smirking calm. There was no _morality_ to it, no outrage scaffolding it. No pain visible in it. The hurricane within him was made manifest in the violence of his sword; whatever agony was obviously ravaging him, he wanted her to feel it _instead_ of him, not _with_ him.

Without a word spoken, he wanted her to feel a lifetime of his pain; this was not a sword fight. Every gesture was a saturated communication, marinated in his sadism, in the unheard screams of his trauma, in his longing for connection. In his rejection of the same.

It was anathema.

Even as she revolted against the poisonous expectations of his violence she realized that she would have walked through hell with the man. There was no pain she would not have faced with him, could not have faced with him, and at the same time, there was no way she would let him hurt her to escape his own suffering.

She sent the pain back to him, bound in flames and steel’s sharp edge. He dodged.

They stood high in the Wutian cliffs in a sea of fire; artillery shells danced around them, ripping aberrant palm leaves loose to spin in the tumultuous sky. The natural sky was lost to her; in its place was a labyrinth of limestone debris, tossing in smoke and neon shades of gas. Beneath them, reinforcements surged from both sides; it would not be long before Wutian troops were overwhelmed. The town was almost Shinra’s. The morning was almost over. 

An explosion erupted from her hand as she dodged, turning through the inferno to strike his side; Sephiroth defended, his agility unmatched. When she navigated the vicissitudes of their violence enough to mount anther attack, her strike seemed to melt the earth; fire knocked him off balance. He grunted, the first she’d heard from him, and adjusted, watched her face through the rippling, searing air; his eyes narrowed. 

“Had enough?” She asked him. The words were a patina; perfunctory goading, a single scratch could peel them away to reveal deadening rage inside her. Her shock, her sadness, her breaking heart, all felt numb, far from her grasp. In a battle like this, this hatred was her refuge. Her eyes deadened; this was the hate that had seen her through Junon, this was the hate that had seen her through that militant rapist in the Nibelheim Mansion, the night she met Sephiroth. This was the numbed murder that Sephiroth’s actions evoked in her; she would _not_ feel his pain. She would not feel anything at all. Aesis didn’t want that hatred. She didn’t want to be cauterized; she wanted to feel _herself_. It was harder and harder.

A second battle was raging now; her cold hatred, the deadening murderousness of it, against her feeling. Her hot rage, her warm love, her heartbreak.

He leapt through the air; his response was a series of blows whose sheer force she felt in her bones, whose speed took her breath away. She felt overtaken; Aesis leaned into a swell of fury as he pushed her back and braced against his strength. Their swords crossed. _That_ was the first thing she felt, cracking through her at the force of his onslaught. _Fury._

“Have you?”

The first he’d spoken, his voice matched his sneer, gravel and sadism deep in his chest.

The answer was yes. When she’d fought him before, their repartee had been imbued with playfulness, a sense of boundary; it was an orchestration of aggression and respect that left her bound in warmth, bound in joy. Now, when she looked at him, she felt completely hollow. This, Aesis knew, was true threat. This was the place she never wanted to go, this was what waited on the frontiers of lethality she had asked him never to cross. She thought of Tifa, of the way her friend’s rage came out of her in tears. _I’m sick of this_. Reality didn’t give a damn if Aesis was sick of it. She wanted to weep. She had no choice but to fight. _Yes, she’d had enough._ Aesis roared.

Her retaliation was another explosion, a faked strike of her blade; Aesis seized the opening to kick him. Sephiroth rolled, steadying his breath on impact. He was aware that she had chosen to hurt him when she could well have moved to kill, and at that realization, finally, he spoke. “Do not show me mercy, Wutian, not now. Do not be selective in who you kill and who you spare.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Aesis deflected the projection with as much brutality as she deflected his attacks. “ _I_ don’t want to kill anyone. _You_ attacked civilians. _You_ are the one presuming to be the arbiter of life and death.”

“ _I_ presume – you strike through the sky, Wutian” She stared. _What did he just say?_ He growled, regrouped with a swipe of his blade. “I attacked murderers,” he sneered. “ _Cowards_ hiding behind their children as shields. They do not deserve to live.”

“Why are you so determined to believe that? What _evidence_ do you have?”

“You lie for them,” he evaded her question.

“That mother was a civilian,” she growled. “She was trying to protect her son. Your government is the only entity here who hides behind the blood of children.” She lunged, he blocked. Aesis glared. “You should know that better than anyone.”

Sephiroth roared. “You are wrong. If you want an arbiter of life, Wutian, then I will give you a demon. I will give you a _God_.”

“It was heavily implied,” Aesis dodged, “that I do not want that.”

Before she could reorient, he struck with his full might.

It was one of his favorite strategies, to lull his opponents into a rhythm of combat and then lash out with a magnitude of strength unlike anything they had learned to accommodate. It was meant to disarm her. It did. To her shock, he followed with a knee; she blocked, the blade of her forearm hitting deep in his hip as she pushed off of him. Masamune chased her; the cut nicked her shin, but stopped short of any serious injury. _Surely he had the range to do worse. He held back. Was that care? Was that only a sadistic taunt, a bait-and-switch?_

Aesis treated it as a bait-and-switch and spun, summoning her sword back to her hand, and blocked his next attack. The force knocked him back, grunting in exertion.

“Mm,” Aesis smiled, a smile that seemed to turn away from her hard eyes. “That is a neat trick.”

“Who taught you that?” he asked, his eyes narrowing.

“You wouldn’t believe me.”

She threw a blitz of fire; strikes of her sword interspersed in an unpredictable succession of the explosions, rained down on him, disoriented him. Weaving under his arm to close, she blocked his sword at the wrist before she spun her elbow into the soft tissue just above his jaw. He staggered; _that was an off switch_. _He should have collapsed._ Sephiroth was still conscious. She struck him again, just below the base of his throat; _short of a kill strike_ , he glared. _Why wouldn’t she take it?_ _Why didn’t he?_ He fell forward, holding his chest; incapacitated, briefly, he looked up at her.

“Why are you doing this?” She asked. “ _Why?_ I want to understand.”

“Your army killed Genesis,” he gasped. “ _You_ killed Genesis.”

Aesis exhaled. “No,” her mind raced. _Had Genesis died? How?_ “This isn’t my army, Sephiroth.” She looked at him. “ _I_ tried to _help_ you. I saw that hit coming and sent magic into the field to protect you, I know I shielded Genesis. I _know_ I did.” Sephiroth shook his head and glared, “You commanded terrorists to—”

“—I did _not_. I am not commanding this army. Think, Sephiroth, you are brilliant, use your _mind.”_ Aesis growled. “You know what it would look like if you attacked a commander in full view of her troops. Look around you. Is that what’s happening?” His eyebrow tensed as he took her point, but he did not look. His eyes narrowed.

“The man who fired that rocket was a civilian, a dying man with incredible resolve. Why would you think otherwise?”

“No _civilian_ could—”

“—You assume. Why not?” She snapped. “You invade without any idea of what it means to have a home. I _know_ you know the pain of lost love. I _know_ you live every moment of every merciless goddamn day with the pain of belonging nowhere.” Sephiroth winced, he pulled his head back. “Can you not imagine how a civilian might fight against that?”

He sneered. “What does it matter?”

“That man was blown apart and still fought to avenge love,” Aesis whispered. “You have that in common with him, Sephiroth; you are doing the same thing.” They both swallowed; he was struggling against an understanding of his enemy that punched him in the gut; she with the realization that the refuge of her hatred was firmly lost; her hatred did not feel like refuge, not anymore. “I have felt pain like yours and it makes it impossible for me to hate you,” she whispered; warmth flooded her in its private victory over the deadness he catalyzed. Her next words were issued in fire, in challenge: “Can you not rise to recognize your _own_ pain? Can you not see that pain in another and _empathize_?”

He blinked. His breath caught.

“I… How can I… Alone?”

“You’re not alone,” she whispered. “You need to get your _ass kicked_ , but you are not alone. I will be with you in your despair, Sephiroth; I will _not_ feel it _instead_ of you.”  
  
He believed her. He heard her voice, again:

_Your heart does not feel cold, Sephiroth._

She felt the ground underneath her shake and remembered. Another stroke of bad luck to compound the clusterfuck of that day: aberrant artillery shells would misfire, detonating an armament of munitions that would rip the cliff’s northern peak apart in a hail of nitrogen gas and burning phosphorus. The same peak they stood on. Her eyes widened as she remembered her Com Sim training; she remembered a blast ripping a hole through the Wutian coastline, she remembered white phosphorus rain, burning through the bones of those under it. _Even they wouldn’t survive that._

“It’s going to blow. We have to get off this.” He glared at her.

“Please, Sephiroth. I’m trying protect you.”

His right hand crossed his chest; for a moment, it looked as if he was about to place his hand to soothe his heart; instead, less convincingly than she anticipated, he readied his sword. “No one can protect me.”

She squared her jaw; the hard edges of a decision steeled her eyes. “Like hell,” Aesis ran toward him as the detonation began. Sephiroth readied Masamune as she spun away from his blade, as the rock beneath her feet began to collapse, consumed in the blast. It was a fool’s strike, he was too fast, too strong; rushing Sephiroth headlong was the last thing on Gaia she wanted to do. She spun into his blade, hoping to clear her path to him, and saw sparks fly on impact.

 _Contact_ , she remembered him saying. _I think when I saw your power, your… eyes, I must have recognized someone cut from the fabric of my own soul, someone… I may have wanted to close that distance._

His pupils tensed, the slightest twitch in his forearm betrayed the years of muscle memory that told him to parry, to skewer her in her own foolhardy momentum.

She punched his wrist.

He let his sword fall away.

Aesis felt the warmth of his chest as she collided with him. She wrapped an arm around his neck and turned to dispel the flame engulfing them. They were in freefall, the first moments of a seven hundred foot drop into the ocean below; Aesis looked back to him, her ferocious eyes searching, their power and wild honing as if all of her mind, all of her might, was leveraged to ensure he was safe.

It was then, as he took her whole focus, a piece of limestone debris broke from a nearby boulder and glanced the back of her skull.

Swirling ocean depths and jagged rocks closed in.

Aesis fell unconscious against Sephiroth’s chest.

Even buffered by the strength of his barrier, the water hit Sephiroth’s back like concrete.

He did not feel the pain of the impact, he felt the pressure; force rocked his bones and everything went black. For in instant, Sephiroth lost consciousness. Went he came too, it was all he could do to override the instinct to breathe. He choked. His chest screamed, his lungs felt ripped apart. His skin burned, injuries screaming in salt. He was alone. 

_Where was she?_

Consciousness reeling, he looked out into the deep, into a chaos of bubbles and darkness and frigid water that stabbed at his eyes; he could see nothing. His diaphragm kicked in reflexive protest, demanding air; he was drowning. Sephiroth swam to the surface and gasped in a full breath. He scanned furiously. The Wutian wasn’t there.

He had a choice, and he knew it. 

She was his enemy, of that he was certain. Her eyes, so like his own, cut weakness into him like knives. When he looked in her eyes, he felt naked in the piercing acuity of her sight, as she read him he felt walls to her mind that he could not breach. If he did ever cross her frontiers… he suspected the story behind those eyes was a horror he could not bear to know. She was his enemy. _Now all of that could drown. Slip eternally into the furthest depths, lost to him forever. Away from him, forever._

_She had saved his life. She would be alive in all certainty, if she had simply left him to die._

_Could he take life from her, and still leave her to drown?_

He heard Hojo’s voice: _You have always been an adequate killer._

Sephiroth took a full breath and dived under. He couldn’t.  
  
The abyss loomed, dark, deep; the murky water, obstructed visibility, the cold all closed in on him. He saw nothing, and then he saw her. 

Aesis was still, sinking slowly; she looked peaceful, she looked _innocent_. He knew she was dying. Sephiroth grabbed her, sealing her lips with his own, and forcefully exhaled his own air into her body.

Her eyes snapped open, he saw the white of her eyes screaming in terror, felt her choke, cough, her fist colliding against his clavicle. He wrestled her convulsing body to the surface, giving her what air he could as she fought desperately to expel the water in her lungs. Coughing did not do justice to what he saw; the force of her body fighting to survive, her clawing grip on his shoulder, the contractions of her diaphragm so violent he imagined she might crack her own rib; it shocked him. He held onto her, taking care to help her head stay above the surface as he swam them both to shore. Her grip released in his; her breath softened and Aesis began shaking, tears streaming down her face. Out of her control, her convulsing body moved in its own wisdom from the edge of death back to life again; the terror, the relief, cracked through her and dissolved her mind. She could not speak. She could not think. The world was oxygen and screaming lungs.

Watching her fight for life in his arms, watching her seize it, seized him. The morning fell away from him, lost in the feel of her body, lost in the rock of her breath, its force piercing his armor, moving with his own.

As a gentle wave guided them to the shore, as he carried her from its crest to the black sand beach before them, she still struggled. She writhed out of his arms, falling to her knees as she clawed at her armor, still shaking uncontrollably, still crying.

Sephiroth wasn’t sure what he was doing; he was instinct and feeling, desire and need. His hands were moving, first to steady hers, to help as she ripped off her pauldrons, her jacket. Then she was still clawing, that armored chest plate. _Was it was hypothermia?_ Her armor was off, lifted to reveal bare skin. His, next, black leather and white steel scattered on the midnight sand. She collapsed onto the rocks, shaking, he followed, his arms around her, his naked chest against her own. 

“You survived,” he whispered into her neck. “You survived.”

She felt dissolved in that ocean’s abyss, she felt dissolved in the strength of his arms, pressing her into the warmth of his chest, into the blend of beating heart and ocean salt and musk. Then her lips were on his. Deep, hungry. _Alive._

His grip tightened; she heard his soft cry against her tongue as he moved to pull her closer. The kiss deepened.

Sephiroth took her bare breast in his rough hand, to his lips, the soft wet heat of his tongue came with voracious pressure. She felt the brush of his teeth and cried out, she felt his moan against her skin; Aesis let out a shuddered breath; instinctively, she moved into him. His weight shifted, parting her legs. It was then, as her hips arched into the pressure, into the heat, that she remembered; a vague sense returned to her that not ten minutes earlier she had been fighting this man for her life.

Sephiroth stopped suddenly, and let his forehead rest in the valley of her sternum. The morning was coming back to him; scattered pieces, fragments that felt almost like the memories of another. The actions of another. She realized he was crying. He was _lost_. So was she.

The word “wrong” seemed woefully inadequate, but it was the word that came first to her disoriented mind. It twisted her in confusion. _She was Aesis,_ her name returned from the depths. _A woman who fought to take back her dignity, a woman who wrestled murder into revolution. She did not fuck when it felt wrong. She did not fuck when she was confused._ Aesis thought about Tifa. She remembered her friend’s touch in Nim’s torture suite and in a different way, she reached for Tifa again. _I love you._

 _I imagine there’s a part of you that never cared about any of it,_ Tifa had said. _That just wanted… to dissolve in that connection._

The heat of his breath against her breast.

_Maybe this time we’ll find a better way._

“Sephiroth,” Aesis whispered, “Stop. Stop right now. This is wrong.” She paused, and whispered, “we both deserve better than this. _Our relationship_ deserves better. I…” _Fuck. “_ I know this is going to make no fucking sense, but I care too much about us to let this happen.”

Sephiroth listened. He rolled off of her, shaking his head. “I’m sorry,” she heard. “I’m sorry.” 

Then, “Forgive me.”

He wouldn’t look at her.

“Forgive me,” she replied.

Sephiroth shook his head. His mind was reeling, the shame of holding, touching, _tasting_ her, the shame of what he thought he had done to Genesis and what he unconsciously knew he had done to those civilians overwhelmed him. He could not make sense of it. He could not land on any sense of reality that felt stable, that felt grounded. “Improbably, impossible— deviations of my mind, I…” Sephiroth noticed her confused expression as he tried to explain. “I am sorry. I don’t…” The words were a tangential effort to express something he felt no language could contain.

That was another reason it was wrong, Aesis knew, in an already imaginative smorgasbord of red flags: Loose associations, disorganized speech. A god complex, his soaring grandiosity. Violent paranoia. Impulsivity. _His absolute, unwavering certainty in a paucity of evidence_. The fault lines of Sephiroth’s mind, treacherous cracks forged in incredible trauma, incredible abandonment, were coming apart. _He wasn’t a caricature of evil,_ Aesis realized, _that was not what this was. He was slipping in and out of psychosis._ _This was the door Jenova had walked through to lay claim to him._

_Like hell would she do the same._

“You are hurt,” She said, pausing to find her words. “You are extremely dangerous like this, but… you are not… a monster. Your mind… I think what Shinra has done to you is tearing your mind apart.”

“— You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he snapped. “Of course I’m not… Monsters have nothing to do with me, I… They did not _do_ …” He stalled out, and regrouped in denial. “I am loyal to Shinra. It has not always been _easy_ but they did not… hurt… me.”

“Uh huh.”

He glared, reaching for the anger that would make his confusion negotiable. Reaching for the duty that would glue him together. “I… don’t know what happened today,” he said honestly. “I know you are my enemy. You’ve saved my life twice today, Wutian. I owe you that debt, but I cannot… I cannot…” his eyes lingered on her body with penetrative longing, “ _be_ … with you. My mission… _My friend_.”

He stepped away.

It occurred to her that there was no reason to believe Genesis was dead, and it was likely a mistake to assume, as she had before, that she could trust Sephiroth’s certainty.

“Are you sure he died?” She asked sadly, watching him. “I didn’t see you check.”

He stared at her for a moment, exhaled deeply.

“I must go to him,” he said finally.

He did.

And later, when official word came from Shinra intelligence that the civilians he’d killed were Wutian insurgents, Sephiroth tried as hard as he could to believe it.

* * *

In the Orphanage, Sephiroth cried.

The green hazard light closest to their cage lit up his skin, its intensity waxing and waning rhythmically over him like a heartbeat. Like the sinusoid of an EKG.

_Sometimes I don’t know if I’m alive or dead. I’m so lonely. I’m so alone._

It had never felt so real. He cried after One had gone to bed, he cried as memories of Wutai pressed to the fore of his mind. It was the training he’d done earlier that day, in the reconstructed coastal incursion. There were jarring differences between his memories and what the Com Sim had been programmed to show. _Shinra’s lies._

He had clung to the belief, however anxiogenic, however hollow, that the people he’d killed that day were insurgents. Now he felt confident they were civilians, confidence derived from data, confidence derived from the common sense that a screaming woman clutching her child was a terrified mother, not a soldier. As he breathed through his tears, Sephiroth realized that his fight to reclaim his mind from Jenova’s grip had afforded him the psychic fortitude he needed to see clearly.

That did not make it any easier to live with what he’d done.

He wept.

“Hey,” it was a boy nearby, named Fifteen, a solid training partner with only one eye converted to Jenova’s phenotype. “It’s gonna be okay.” The boy threw something in his cage, Sephiroth jumped. _An attack?_ A protein bar. Sephiroth looked at him in confusion, and Fifteen explained: “You get hungry, nights like this.”

Mari reached over and patted his leg. “Uh, thanks…” he whispered, confused. _They noticed he was crying? They cared?_

One turned, looking at him sleepily.

“Nightmares?” She asked, reaching her hand out to him. Sephiroth nodded. _Something like that._ “I’d say it isn’t real,” she whispered. “But it is.” _Yes._

Sephiroth reached through the bars, lacing the tips of his fingers with hers. One smiled softly, and stayed that way.

His finger against hers.

Barely, bearably, _contact._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO. I realized as I've been writing that this dark cloud of "what if he snaps" was lingering over me. This violence seems too fundamental to who both these characters are not to be explored, and it just felt unspeakable. When things feel unspeakable to me I tend to get LOUD, so. If you're new to the story, this is CC Sephiroth, not post-Jenova Sephiroth (Orphanage Sephiroth is post-Jenova Sephiroth's mind in teenage Sephiroth's body. It's complicated). I didn't want Seph to be as sick as CC Seph when he meets Aesis. I want him to be healthy enough to sustain the kind of relationship I have in mind for them, and I also think it needed to be explored in some way. So absolutely, these are all red flags, and while this can be very sexy, full of longing and enveloping care, I hope the chapter does justice to how truly violent, confusing and painful it is, and how it breaks apart reality testing and authenticity in relationships (outside of violence and rescue). 
> 
> I also wanted to illustrate how the (imperfect) reciprocity and integrity in these character helps them dig their way out of this. Aesis will brave any emotion in a reciprocal, boundaried relationship, but she will not feel someone's pain FOR them, and that makes her my damn hero.
> 
> Anyway, end ramblings. Thank YOU for reading! I hope you enjoyed it! Feedback is always appreciated.
> 
> Up next: We go back to the Orphanage, find out what happened to Aesis there, and get one step closer to wiping the floor with this time monster.


	16. Nibelheim Files, Episode 4: Original Sin, part 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the Orphanage, tension pushes Aesis and Mari's relationship to its breaking point.
> 
> CW: This is probably the most trauma-heavy of any chapter I'll write for this story. There is dissociative trauma, character death, gaslighting, emotionally abusive behavior, betrayal, shame and accountability in very painful circumstances, and there are graphic depictions of violence. The role of sexual trauma, specifically child sexual abuse, in Aesis and Mari's history is explored. I won't write any noncon explicitly (it happens off-screen), but write about the emotional and medical aftermath, and have Aesis discuss her pain and injuries. My headcanon is that all of this trauma is pervasive in Shinra's world; to me it seems such a natural extension of what we see in the game, from the entire premise of these experiments, to child soldiers, to colonialism, Hojo's dialogue about breeding Aerith and putting Ifalna on slides, to Scarlet's gimp, to Pres Shinra's monologue about taking anything he wants without moral qualm, to Rufus' line that "I own you." I usually say that this is a major part of what this story aims to explore, but in this chapter, IT IS VERY EXPLORED. Take care of yo'self.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So illustrations for this chapter are delayed. Life happened this weekend and this chapter was difficult to write. Hopefully there are some tender moments in it as well, so for those I'd recommend Heartbeats, by José González. The chapter really delves into issues of accountability and shame in these characters, so for a more tongue-in-cheek musical accompaniment to that fun little adventure I've been listening to Guilt by Marianne Faithful. More seriously, I wrote the saddest parts of this listening to Lazarus by David Bowie. 
> 
> I will probably make some small edits to it this week, but the plot is what it is and I'm done with it today.

_“I wonder why Sev didn’t get cascading silver locks when they changed how he looks,” One jabbed at him, her tone playful, taunting._

_“Maybe he was in the hair control group,” Fifteen mused._

_An amused look crossed Sephiroth’s face, filtered beneath silver bangs; Mari scrunched her nose. “Wait, does Professor Hojo use control groups?”_

_“Not apparently,” Sephiroth muttered._

_It didn’t take long after that for Mari to be sucked back into to her conversation with Xavier; Sephiroth was impressed with the sheer amount of energy Mari was expending in an effort to articulate her boundaries to him after a more recent display of unchecked aggression in training. Xavier stressed, at length, that Mari’s worry angered him; it’s just I don’t want worry, he said. Worry makes me angry. Again and again, it’s just I don’t like worry. Mari, in turn, was becoming more and more upset and had already said twice she wanted the conversation to end. Xavier kept firing back, and Mari kept responding. To Sephiroth, it didn’t seem like a conversation worth having; Xavier danced around Mari’s observations as if he were dodging bullets. “Xav,” she tried quietly, “it felt like you were browbeating me. I was worried you were hurt and you kept repeating how much I was wrong and how much that pissed you off, even after I stopped, like you wanted your anger to change how I felt and how I saw what was happening. I won’t change how I feel and how I perceive reality because you’re pissed at me.”_

_“I’m sorry I hurt you but yeah, I didn’t mean that,” Xavier said quickly, too quickly, “and frankly I don’t appreciate that you didn’t tell me about this sooner. I would hope for a certain amount of upfrontness about these things, and I’m not okay with that. It feels like you’re trying to punish me. You seem angry.”_

_Mari opened her mouth, but no sound came out. His apology felt so dismissive and condemning, so engineered to put the onus of responsibility back onto her, it made Sephiroth feel sick._

_It disgusted him._

_“I’m angry but I’m also hurt! I already told you that I'm hurt!”_

_“Maybe we just shouldn’t talk about this, Mari. It’s not okay with me to be told that my training is impacting my humanity. That’s what pissed me off.”_

_Sephiroth rolled his eyes.  
_

_“You said you were pissed because I was worried they would hurt you. That is what you said. I feel crazy! Xav, I care about you and I… I don’t want this conversation!”_

_Xavier waited a full godforsaken minute to respond._

_“Oh I meant both,” he waved her off. Like hell. “Sorry if that wasn’t clear. Mari, I don’t mean to make you feel crazy. Why don’t you come to me when you’re ready to talk.”_

_It was a smack in the face; one last condescending final word. It was a conversation whose impact seemed to break Mari into a punching bag; Sephiroth watched her as she struggled to affirm her mind and emotions against Xavier's refusal to acknowledge them in any meaningful way. He shifted in discomfort.  
_

_He had seen her trapped in so many variations on that conversation’s theme. More often than not, Mari was a punching bag. One, immersed in her conversation with Fifteen and ignoring Xavier as best she could, didn’t notice._

_Sephiroth wished he'd said something, but had no idea what that could be._

_He though the great comfort Xavier seemed to derive from his imprisonment was that, in the twisted abuses and corruption of Shinra’s labs, he would never be held accountable for his aggression. There was too much corruption. Too much to cover up. Mari said nothing, and once again, he got away with it._

_Had Sephiroth felt that way? Had he acted that way?_

_“Are you alright, Mari?” He asked._

_She shrugged.  
_

_"It goes into the between times; that's where seven ate nine and it'll eat him alive."_

_He looked at her, his eyes narrowing. Mari blinked at him. "Sev, are you okay?"_

* * *

One opened her eyes. It was still night; nocuous green hazard lights flooded her vision, more painful than they should have been. She smelled the artificial citrus of Shinra’s lemon-lime detergent and for an instant, her heart stopped beating: the smell that strong meant someone was dead, meant all that remained of their existence, their hair, fingerprints, their smell, had been washed away. She looked first with urgency to Mari, who was asleep on her back, twisting her nose into her pillow in an unconscious effort to escape the stench. Beside her, Seven seemed unbothered. One breathed in a stolen moment of relief, surrendered too quickly as she looked beyond the cage adjoining hers. She felt a punch in her chest, her breath came out ragged.

Fifteen was gone.

Not an hour earlier, he had thrown Seven a protein bar. One blinked. Tears. Hot and poisonous, gone an instant after their traitorous arrival. She felt numb then, she felt nothing, and decided she was handling it well. _One more down._ She hated her own callousness, but as she lay down and stared at the foil wrapper Seven had tucked under his arm, she knew if she allowed herself to feel Fifteen’s absence she would go mad. In the far corners of her mind, the instinct was brewing to take the sharp edge of her tile and end herself before they could murder her; if she felt what his death evoked in her, she would move closer to the thing in her that was most lethal. Instead, One rubbed the tile in her hand and offered her soul up to any God who would stop her feeling. _His eye didn’t take,_ she thought. _They killed him because his eye didn’t take. It never looked like Sephiroth’s, it never looked the right way._

One felt a chill in her bones. _They were weapons,_ she knew, _built to be used, and discarded when they broke._

Her efforts to paint those guards and scientists in compassionate colors were pitiful; paper-thin attributions of grace that faded like ghosts, apparitions regurgitated from a dream for something she had never known, something she never would. She believed sometimes that those guards saw them as human beings, but every time she imagined a line they would not cross, they violated it. They had dragged him down that hallway, down the old staircase with the red light above it. Rumor was, that was where they kept the incinerator, but no one knew for sure. No one had ever come back, not until Seven; _Seven didn’t remember, and he’d come back different._

She knew Fifteen had been dragged down that hallway. She tried not to imagine what he must have felt, the terror of it, but she did anyway, and then her tears fell. Was he afraid? Was he relieved? Had he known peace in that moment, had those vicious scientists granted him some sort of anesthetic overdose, the lethal kiss of a heroin mother to stop his heart in a dream? Or had he died screaming, fully conscious of their betrayal? Her tears fell.

They were not machines. They were human. And when one died, that meant another lived. _One dies. One lives._

One knew the fine line separating her from Fifteen’s fate. They were waiting to see if her eyes took, that was the story she told herself to rationalize each breath she drew when her friends did not. They wanted to see if her defiant biology would break, if they could _break_ her.

She felt the longing. _Longing_ for relief, for safety, _longing_ for something human in her to be held, loved by another and _protected_. _She did not want to break_.

Her stomach turned to cement with the realization that the humanity she held onto was close to breaking. _It was so close._ It felt so precarious.

In that context, it was a relief when the pain in her head returned.

It was a relief when, as the lights brightened and a wave of vertigo washed over her, absolutely nothing felt real.

One was screaming.

Sephiroth jumped up and saw her, curled in fetal position, clutching at her face with one hand and jerking her tile back and forth with the other. Her screams made him think of a battlefield injury. He scanned for blood, for the stark contrast that would point him to injury. When he saw nothing, he looked closer. At first, it looked like she was holding her temples; after a few moments, he realized she was clutching at her eyes.

It happened in a blur; she was clutching Mari’s hands, grasping his with clammy touch, she was screaming, writhing, and then, suddenly, she opened her eyes. She was staring directly at him. _Eyes like his_. Sephiroth’s heart skipped a beat. He could see pooling purples and red, hemorrhaging capillaries bruising thin orbital skin. Her tears ran red with blood. Her face, which had appeared normal to him only hours earlier, looked swollen, beaten.

At the center of all that violence, he watched her eyes change. An unnatural green, glowing neon hues, cracked through her irises in a heterochromatic punch that ripped a scream from her throat higher than he had ever heart Aesis’ voice go. He heard tissue rip as she blinked; upon opening, her pupils dilated into a serpentine shape.

She was crying. She was terrified. Sephiroth held her hand, and jolted at the realization that for the first time, he did not see those eyes as an intrinsic quality of who she was. She as much herself with and without them. Still crying, still terrified, and still breathlessly enraged. Still defiant. Her voice was the same, her words, their intonation. As the guards came in, as a scientist forced her eye open to check her pupillary reflexes, as her screams at the pain took on a helplessness and agony he had never heard outside a battlefield, he realized that those eyes did not make her a monster. They did not make her a demigod. She was a human being, still, a human being with different eyes.

One took her tile and rammed it through the scientist’s hand.

Chaos broke out, and the guards dragged her away.

When they brought her back, One was bleeding. Blood soaked fabric between her legs, when they threw her onto the cement floor and she tried to land on her feet, her lower back gave out, jerking. One fell, crying out in pain, catching herself on all fours. He could imagine alternatives, comforting narratives of gut punches or medical treatments that could explain those injuries, but they felt wrong to him. He felt confident of what had happened to her, he felt sick with it, but said nothing.

Despite their glowing green, her eyes looked hollow. 

When she finally spoke, she said, “They’re going to kill me.” She looked at Mari; she looked at him. “I can pick the lock,” she told him. “Mari, I’m ready. I can’t live through this again. I want to run.”

“You can’t,” Mari whispered.

“Come with me.”

“No. They’ll catch us. We can’t get past security. It's just... you just have to... you just can't let them get to you like...” Mari stalled out. "It upsets me that you worry. It's not so bad."

A tear ran down One’s cheek. “What the fuck are you talking about Mari, _of course I'm worried._ It is that bad. It is that bad. I can’t live through this again,” she repeated.

“If you leave me, I’ll be alone. You can’t leave me alone,” Mari had tears in her eyes. “You know what they do to me. They’ll kill me. Please, One. Don’t leave me.”

Over and over, One said, “I can’t live through this again.”

* * *

One did run. _Well._ She hobbled.

He went with her.

They made it just past the Tombs when the guards got to them.

Sephiroth hadn’t expected it to happen so quickly. In the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a gun turn toward One’s head; he had just enough time to turn that gun on its owner before they were both restrained.

He hadn’t expected to see small fingers curled around another guard’s hand, hadn’t expected a child to emerge from behind him, as if she’d been showing the way. He saw her uniform emerge first, the number twelve across her sleeve, posture and gaze foreign to him. A girl with Mari's features stared down at him, and his mind reeled.

“Mari,” One’s jaw dropped.

“That is _not_ my name,” the other girl spoke with a deeper voice, a harder voice than any sound he’d ever heard Mari make and looked at them, her eyes burning. “You _abandoned_ Mari,” she roared in a tone of voice so hateful he lost his breath. “You left Mari to _die_.” Sephiroth thought that this way, Mari was like a force, furious, something that would swell in a wounded child’s imagination of evil while it ripped them apart with bare teeth.

 _No,_ he thought stupidly. _No, Mari wasn’t okay._

One screamed in rage. Mari’s eyes lit up and that sinister red glare, that monster’s eyes, filled the room. Everything went black.

He regained consciousness for an instant, just enough to time glimpse a stairwell with a red light.

Then he came to again.

Mari was screaming. Crying. She didn’t understand what was happening. She didn't know where she was.

One was standing in the chamber of one of Shinra’s incinerators, her body shaking. A tear streaked her cheek. A guard’s finger brushed the incinerator’s controls. 

Mari cried, calling out for One, her desperate, echoing words untangled in his mind to suggest she had no idea why One was in that chamber.

The finger moved. Stopped.

_Wait._

A hand grabbed Mari’s arm, pushed her into the incinerator.

_This one’s broken._

“Mari,” One sobbed. Mari’s expression dulled for an instant, crossing the incinerator’s threshold; when her energy returned she looked at her friend with disgust, with hatred, and stepped back.

“You! You had to worry! You betrayed her, you stupid crazy bitch. You did this!”

"Mari," she sobbed.

"Fuck you."

_The finger moved._

Sephiroth lunged forward.

Fire. The incinerator’s observation panel closed as flames erupted behind it.

He roared.

When the panel opened, the fire was still burning, and only one body was left standing in the inferno, backlit in flames. They parted and he saw One limp forward, with eyes of hellfire, open in defiance, naked but for a mess of blood and ash, serpentine eyes glowing red. _Red._ Through the fire, he saw an orb of red materia emerge from her chest where it stayed, suspended in air. The chamber radiated with the force of its magic, the room hummed. One held out her hand, and as he heard the sound of her roar, the room around him exploded. The guards screamed; they were burning alive, burning from the inside out. He remembered how Aesis had incinerated that militant rapist alive in the Nibelheim mansion, and watched the first of his ilk, the first to attempt her execution, fall to their knees, their skin cracking apart, incinerated in their own fire.

Then time froze, One with it. The burning guards suspended in place, like a frame in a stalled projector. A katana's blade sliced the air in front of Sephiroth apart, and out of swirling light, Aesis stepped forward. He felt his heart hit his stomach, felt relief overwhelm him. He looked down and realized that he was himself again. Adult. Armed. The awkwardness of his adolescent physique was replaced by a body built in decades of training, by strength, power, experience. The stiff fabric of his uniform was replaced by the steel of his armor, the leather of his coat, molded perfectly to his body.

Aesis placed her hand on the observation panel glass. “Dear, mad girl,” she whispered to her child self. “I’ll take it from here.”

Behind her, a burning guard wiggled free of her magic; as he lunged for her, Aesis caught his head and pulled it back, meeting his eyes. “Do you feel it?” she asked softly. “What you made her feel?” She pulled a gun out of another’s holster, and fired one shot point-blank to the center of the guard’s forehead, her gaze wet as she watched him fall. Sephiroth arched his eyebrow; he had not expected her to extend that man the mercy of a swift death. She turned her attention back to the observation window.

“They raped me,” she said finally. “Many times.” Her voice was quiet, but solid in its confidence, in its dignity. She lifted her head with the same edged poise he had seen in her from the beginning; Sephiroth felt a deep sorrow, a deep respect, and listened. Her voice cracked, she steadied. “They _documented_ it, they put the fucking photos in my files. They called it _cleaning_.”

“Wha— Why?”

“Because they could, maybe. To undo the truth, while simultaneously flaunting it. To trick anyone reading those files into participating in a crime. I don't know. I don’t care.” Aesis took a deep breath, her fingers landed delicately on her materia, her heartbreak grounding on a dignified pulse. “What you saw was the worst of it. Fracture of the inferior pubic rami,” Aesis’ jaw tensed, “they left it to heal without anesthetic.” She turned then, looking dispassionately at the remaining guards, trapped in time, burning endlessly. “And then they failed to kill me.”

“I should have stopped—"

“You couldn’t have stopped it. This is what happened. It’s how they broke us apart; it’s how Mari died.”

Aesis shook her head. "Can you imagine what it did to me, to fight for them, after this? To _love_ them, after this?"

"Yes, I can imagine it," he said only. She nodded.

“I’m grateful you’re here, Sephiroth,” she whispered. “Losing her again, alone, would be… so much more painful.”

“Who was she?” He asked, finally. “Mari? Who was she, really?”

“I don’t know,” Aesis answered. “They got Mari when she was very young, from the slums, and she was alone for most of it. Even when they brought her here, she went through the worst of any of us. Everything they did to me, they did to her, and somehow… they made it worst. They made her more alone. They punished her more harshly when she showed any weakness. They made sure people like Xavier knew she was fair game. We fought to love each other, and for a while…” She pressed her lips together. “You felt the comradery of this place.”

Sephiroth’s throat was dry. “I— I did,” he stammered.

“But the reality was that Shinra made this a zero-sum game. If someone lived, that meant someone else died.” He saw a tear move down Aesis’ cheek. “Mari was kind, she was incredibly brave. If she was angry, she never showed it. She loved chocobos, Sephiroth,” Aesis shook her head. “She’d write stories about them playing in the slums, escaping to open a pizza restaurant and fight crime… she drew sad baby chocobos in her textbooks, hugging each other in the margins of scientific doctrine.” Aesis pressed her lips together. “Everyone took from her, including me. I didn’t really understand what she went through, what she was up against. Mari was the most alone, out of all of us.”

“I saw some of that.”

She stopped; he heard her sharp exhale. 

Aesis swallowed, righting her posture. She continued: “She started hearing voices, sometimes it was like she didn’t know who I was. When she started saying ‘Sometimes I'm called Mari’ I…” She trailed off, and paused before she spoke again. “It was as if sometimes, she became someone else. I think she created someone in her mind, someone with enough rage to murder when she couldn’t, someone who could endure the violence that she couldn’t. Whoever that person was, they died for her in that incinerator. They felt her death for her.”

“Someone not called Mari,” he whispered.

“Yes, exactly.” Aesis looked at him; a tear ran down her cheeks, she was struggling to find her breath. “At least in a sense, she wasn’t alone. None of us felt like we were the same person all the time. We’d lose ourselves, we’d have different memories from one day to the next; we’d _feel_ like we were different people, but for Mari… I never even knew if Mari was her real name.”

He blinked, but Aesis could see in his eyes that he understood. 

“You didn’t kill her,” he said slowly.

She nodded

“No, I didn’t. I loved her. I survived with her support, and then I abandoned her to save myself.” she said finally. “In her death, I lived. There is nothing that can mitigate the atrocity of that.”

“The guards forced it to happen,” Sephiroth frowned.

“I know they did,” Aesis sneered, an red hot rage flashing through her contained demeanor. “I burned them alive with the same fire they used to kill her.” She collected herself and turned to face him, gesturing at the flaming bodies surrounding them. “That didn’t make it better.”

“So we’ve gone back to our origins,” Sephiroth murmured. “To the crimes that made us, in every sense. What was done to us, and what we have done.”

She stepped closer to him. Sephiroth thought of the Wutian coast and whispered, “You’ve seen the lie of my heroism, what… _I did_ … to those people. What I took from Genesis... You’ve seen…” his voice cracked. “You fought me… I remember it. You had the first opening. You could have killed me. You didn’t take it. Why didn’t you—”

“Sephiroth,” she whispered, touching his cheek. At her touch, for a moment, his body softened; he closed his eyes as her palm brushed his skin. 

Then Sephiroth whispered, “This… _this_ is why I sought to build a new world. I lost these memories, I’m sure I sacrificed them with no small amount of relief, but I did not lose the… pain, shame, all folded into a mess of hatred…” His fingers brushed her wrist, and he pulled his hand away. “This world is unforgivable.”

“Perhaps.”  
  
“I am unforgivable.”

“No.”

“In the most horrific things I’ve done, I have Jenova’s influence to hide behind. But in Wutai, there was no excuse. What I did was an atrocity. I never… I never saw it clearly enough to take any responsibility… They told me it wasn’t my fault. _I thought it wasn’t my fault_."

She withdrew her hand and whispered, “Is that what happens when you become enraged?”

“It _isn’t_ , not anymore,” he said urgently. “When I saw them pull that switch…” he gestured to the incinerator’s control, “I could see what was happening, though I felt…” He shuddered. “I felt enraged, but I felt more myself. Reclaiming my mind, my humanity from Jenova has made me… more… _myself_.”

“Then I’m glad I met you when I did,” she whispered.

Aesis turned to face the burning guard; his expressed deadened as his skin split apart, its cracks broke in fire to reveal the red light of the monster’s gleaming eyes. It was fighting against her time magic, she knew. “It’s still trying to separate us,” she watched the guard’s skin burn away as shifting, nebulous shadows began to surround them. “It’s still pushing us toward hatred. Shinra made this monster, but they can’t contain it. It wants to use our power the same way it used that girl’s rage. If it consumes us in this hatred, it will use our power to destroy this planet. We must stop it.”

“We come from evil. We were made in it, this… this is evil. Aesis, I want this to end, I want this out of me.”  
  
“So do I.” She looked at him.

“We are warriors,” his jaw steeled. “We can fight it.”

She nodded. “We must. There’s no other way.”

“How?”

“This monster doesn’t know whose mind belongs to who,” she whispered. “You’re in my memories. I’m trying to get out of yours. We can’t fight it like this.” Aesis spoke with a knowledge whose origins she could not trace. _She just knew what to do._ “We must face this demon in our own minds.”

Sephiroth looked at her, his expression inscrutable. “Nibelheim,” he whispered.

“Probably,” she replied.

She had some sense of where she was heading, and felt the sudden clutch of fear. “Will you hold me, Sephiroth?” Aesis whispered, catching him off guard. “Please.” On the precipice of returning to Junon, to the time when her humanity finally broke in its entirety, she wanted to feel his arms again. He wrapped around her, a wall of warmth and strength, and Aesis let out an unsteady exhale. They stayed that way, for a moment, holding onto each other; then she forced herself back. Her eyes hardened, that flipping switch, that shift into a fighter’s mentality. She closed her warrior eyes, memorizing the feeling of his touch, and after a beat, nodded. “Now I can go back,” Aesis’ jaw steeled.

“Aesis, I want you with me.”

She put her hand on his chest, her touch moved beneath the cold steel of his pauldron to rest against his beating heart. “I’ll be here,” Aesis whispered. “Mari, Fifteen… you have all of us. What we made in this place can be with you always, Sephiroth, despite the bad. You never have to lose the good. You have the connection, the people, that you longed for.”

The ground underneath him fell as her magic broke down, he lost sight of her as nebulous shadow moved in, snatching him downward, into abyss. As he fell into the darkness, Sephiroth heard her voice.

“It’s time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Up next: We explore Sephiroth's memories of Nibelheim. Aesis finds herself face-to-face with the girl who survived Corneo's men, and wants to fight.
> 
> Thank you for reading. After this I think I'm just gonna have a chapter where these characters watch happy TV shows and eat comfort food, damn.


	17. Nibelheim Files, Episode 4: Original Sin, part 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sephiroth wakes up in Nibelheim and confronts Genesis.  
> Zack *sobs, gesturing vaguely*  
> and Aesis fights her way through Junon Harbor and discovers an unlikely adversary: the girl who survived Corneo's ring is back, pissed, and looking just like her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Graphic violence, child abuse and allusion to trafficking and snuff films, some mildly sexual content. Suicidality is in here, a girl threatening suicide with a gun. A few of the conversations in this chapter have been designed to be emotionally abusive, but do feature the characters getting justice that is rarely available in real life. There is Seph/Gen in this chapter, but if you like that ship fluffy or are hoping for a gay relationship that isn't doomed or abusive, here it is explored as both. I struggle with that, because while I personally want Sephiroth for my OC and my OC only (I feel like most SephxOC authors have this in common I dunno hm) I ALSO feel like there is very little heterosexual explanation for this game, especially the remake. But THEN, most of the really intimate relationships between men fit that pattern in canon. Someone dies, or they're a completely abusive trainwreck. Or both. Looking at you, Sephiroth. You're doing great sweetie.
> 
> So if you're new, I am trying to convincingly write Sephiroth as interested in a woman and as more turned on by the experience of getting coralled in a fight than by gender. Pansexiroth with attachment issues. I am TRYING to figure out how to write my hc of his attraction to men in a way that's less problematic, but I'd say that's more fraught in this chapter. 
> 
> If you're reading this regularly, thanks for holding out while I fixed my cord, and if you're new, thanks for stopping by!
> 
> I did make a playlist for Original Sin. If you'd like you can find it [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5VbaUb1BfuXCiUcPuG0tca?si=scxzOs5HTWSG6Me6cePvGw).

_Sunlight, warm over warped rocks, lush greens backlit, disappearing in a white glare, in heat. Noonday sun. Laying on his back on a bed of grass, the touch of those blades against his skin, a wave of innumerable brushstrokes cresting in warm wind, painting in cooling greens, soothing him. Whispering. Sleep. Sleep, Sephiroth._

_Something in his hands; soft, a stuffed moogle. Arms around him, strong; the comfort of that man’s embrace brought a sense of peace he didn’t know he lacked. A man’s nose, a twinkle in his brown eyes, dancing behind glasses just reflective enough to capture the outline of Sephiroth’s eyes, just reflective enough to highlight the unsurpassable canyon of their difference. Gast, there with him, finally, briefly. A moment of embrace, a preserved moment of connection that was now set to a backdrop of horror._

_Once, he asked why Gast died. Now, that question changed; why hadn’t he stopped it? Did he dare think a moogle could absolve him, mitigate the atrocity of what they were doing? Why did Gast leave him there? Did Gast fear him, too?_

_You can still have the good, Aesis said. Perhaps, but he felt he would choke on it. Perhaps, Sephiroth thought, he would be forced to contend with the fact there had been good, even though none of it, none of it, was ever good enough._

_Grass._

_Rocks._

_Warmth._ _  
_

_Nibelheim._

* * *

_Gast’s presence was sporadic at best; he could not remember another embrace. Occasionally, Hojo has offered a firm clap on the back, jarring and unsure, gestures that fell away entirely until the only touch he knew accompanied their tests. Their torture, he realized now. As a child, he’d not known better. He’d thought it normal._

_Another boy, strands of long black hair tumbling over his azure gaze; his conversations with that boy were the first indication Sephiroth received that his life was not like the others. That boy would touch his arm in concern, rub his spine when he cried and it made pain feel softer. One day Sephiroth reached to hug him and felt the return of embrace amidst the smack of glares, shocked repulsion, in the eyes of his caretakers. Hojo was there, a woman whose name escaped him. They pulled him aside and explained he didn’t want to be seen a certain way. Sephiroth has no idea what that meant._

_After that, distance. Something wrong, something stiff. Then one day, a clear command._

_Fight him._

_The takedown was immediate. Brutal, yes, but also hungry. It was hard not to see an element of sadness to it, an element of longing, the way they eschewed punches for ground techniques and clung, clung to each other. Sephiroth felt it; contact, arms and legs wrapped around each other as the desire to be held by another collapsed into the rage, into the command._

_He didn’t know his own strength. He didn’t want to let go. He almost killed that boy; by the time they pulled him off, his lips were blue. Sephiroth watched him, wondering what he felt. Had it hurt?_

_Sephiroth never saw that boy again. When they handed him a weapon, he chose the longest one; next, hours alone in the fields, hours beating katas into his body with a sword that would inevitably prevent him from ever having to touch another again._

_Rocks._

_Grass._

_Colder now._

_More murderous._

* * *

Sephiroth opened his eyes. It had taken over a decade for him to learn what it meant to be a “certain way”, and years longer to privately admit any identification with that path; it was only in the face of losing Genesis forever that he could overcome the repulsion, the shame, that moment with Hojo had instilled in him. For a sentiment of self-loathing so salient it shook his core, Sephiroth barely remembered the day that inspired it. Looking out at the rocky forests of Nibelheim, he wasn’t sure if he was remembering love, friendship, or a first taste of lethal violence that had motivated him to reach for that boy. _How had they so blurred those things together, for a child? How could they have done that? How could they have dared?_

 _Did they poison his path irrevocably?_ He remembered the day Genesis first challenged him vividly; he _felt_ the way Genesis fought, he felt the vibrations of his strikes in his bones, felt the warmth of his magic across Masamune’s length. It had been so long since anyone had reached him across his sword, _so long._ The sheer brutality of Genesis’ fight, the passion of it struck him. Stayed with him. He fought him again, felt it again, and over time, it came to pass that whenever Genesis touched him, Sephiroth felt it somewhere the man’s hand had never been.

 _Gods, he’d wanted it to be different. He’d longed to feel that way for women, but never had._ Women left him cold. Almost everyone left him cold. He thought of Lucrecia’s abandonment. He thought of Hojo’s words: _You always were an adequate killer._ Women left him cold, until he gave all of himself to Jenova, to her poison. His mother. His conqueror. His conquest. His _everything_ , he'd felt determined to make nothing at all. And now?

It didn’t make sense.

How long had it been, since he simply held another, since he had been held? _Once, only, and that… No._ Never properly, as far back as his memory would take him, save that day with Gast. Save that boy. Sephiroth shook his head, trying to untangle his thoughts. He didn’t understand what had just happened; the sudden shift in Aesis, from a warrior, a leader orchestrating an attack, to a woman asking to be held. He didn’t understand the reaction it had stirred in him . It _was_ erotic, the exquisite eroticism he felt in being challenged, in being known, in knowing another. It was sensuality stabilized on the violence that was undeniably his home, as it was hers. Yet that moment felt so much deeper, so much more profound than _eros_ blended in a mess of blood and fear. It felt softer. It felt _safe._ He wanted more.

_Was he moving forward on his path, or was he abandoning it?_

Next to him, a man cleared his throat.

He looked and saw Zack. _Zack_ , blue eyes piercing up through long black bangs, _Zack._ Sephiroth felt a chill. His throat caught and he had to steady himself; why did it almost bring him to tears to see Zack? Why did he feel… so much guilt? _Oh. Oh, Gods, no._ He remembered how he’d attacked him. _Cold. Murder. Had Zack survived?_ Azure eyes, earnest eyes, almost childlike in their goodness, stared up at him as if the world was not about to explode. 

“This landscape. I could swear I’ve seen it before,” Sephiroth avoided eye contact, his voice was as stiff and rich as fine liquor. Asbergian liquor, spilled over cracking ice.

“Huh,” Zack replied. “You know, Sephiroth, maybe you could go out on the town. See the sights. Maybe you have a connection to something here, ya know?” Sephiroth would have said no, he did say no. He would have spent every possible moment alone, working when he wasn’t brooding; reading, he remembered with no small amount of irony that when he arrived in Nibelheim he’d barely begun a novel that made for its hero a man who did not think himself human… fantasied memoires of an aloof and alienated man as he descended into alcohol and drug addiction, toxically enmeshed romances, murderousness and suicide. That book’s appeal may have lessened, but in no iteration of his existence would Sephiroth want to _see the sights_. _On the other hand_ , he begrudged, _he had to do something different this time, and that seemed as obvious a thing as any_. Immediately out of his depth, his ire turned petty and defensive. 

_Did Nibelheim_ have _sights?_

In the Inn’s lobby, he was dizzy. Vertigo. Then — the room was swallowed by another. 

_“The reactor was malfunctioning. We’ve intercepted reports of… the reactor was producing brutal creatures, apparently. They’re attacking civilians at Glacier pass, refugees fleeing the battlefield.” A woman sat atop the bar counter, turning a glass of Shkhivana with an agitated wrist. Venetian blonde curls cascading down her broad shoulders, steel armor and a draped black leather catsuit. Aesis. Outside, it was snowing. The Northern Territories… It was still too easy to fall into her memories, to lose track of himself. Too easy… He recognized the inn in Modeoheim and felt his feet on the ground. Was this Aesis’ revolution?_

_She jumped off the counter and metabolized the news with a tone as dry as her drink: “What a fascinating and unprecedented coincidence.”_

_“Commander, I’m concerned; this…” She was ten steps ahead of the messenger and moving fast. “This wouldn’t be the first time Shinra sent reports of ‘brutal creatures’ ahead of a full-scale assassination attempt. You know what happened last time. If you take a scouting party out there, you could be signing their death warrant, but if you go alone...”_

_Aesis looked annoyed. More deadened than he knew her. More of her was recognizable than he’d seen in SNN’s coverage of Junon, but a brutal, hard edge still ran through her; her presence cut._

_“Welcome to the end of the thought process, private.” She tried to make it sound good-natured. “Take your orders from Barret.”_

_“Commander… Do you think this is a trap, or do you think Shinra’s just… incompetent?”_

_Aesis snapped her armband in place._

_“Yes.”_

“What’ll it be, General Sephiroth, Sir?” 

Sephiroth took some steadying satisfaction that he’d pulled himself out of her memories, at last, he’d returned to himself of his own will. His memories. A different Inn, Nibelheim, the bar. He shook his head. _This isn’t a typical mission. Brutal creatures_ , he told Zack, in the convoy. He remembered the sound of rain, the rhythmic pulse of the convoy’s windshield wiper as it fended off a deluge. Then: _Brutal creatures._ Sephiroth blinked _. Our mission is to investigate a mako reactor. There have been reports of it malfunctioning and producing brutal creatures._ Sephiroth’s jaw tensed. He had recited his brief verbatim. _First, we will dispose of those creatures. Then we will find the source of the problem and neutralize it._ He pressed his lips together.

_What a fascinating and unprecedented coincidence._

He didn’t know what to make of it, not at first; his thoughts took a tangential sidestep and landed on his first moments in Nibelheim. 

_How does it feel to be home after all this time? I have no hometown. I wouldn’t know._ His eyes narrowed. He’d asked some iteration of that question so often. _How does it feel._ He’d never thought of himself as someone who felt, or knew what to feel; his ache for Genesis notwithstanding, he had long experienced the world in shades of agitation orphaned from any emotional understanding. _How do you feel, Sephiroth?_ Zack asked him. How did he feel? His thoughts returned to Aesis, spitfire and fearless as she fought him off a Wutian cliff. _I know you live every moment of every merciless goddamn day with the pain of belonging nowhere._ Her way of putting things pierced him. She was right. It hurt so badly to be here. He hadn’t felt it before. He _hurt._

_He had belonged, he’d belonged with Genesis. He—_

His thoughts snapped back into focus: _brutal creatures_. 

The bartender interrupted his reverie, repeating his question with eyes that betrayed earnest excitement, recognition, weaving in a shadow of trepidation. He meant it kindly enough, but the ex-General recoiled; he now knew how it felt to be looked on without idolatry and fear, and that made it harder, more painful, to face interactions like these. _He missed her._ Sephiroth spoke quietly.

“Shkhivana, if you have…” He watched the man’s forehead knot and quickly rerouted. “I’ll have a gin and tonic.” 

The man handed him a glass with a nervous chuckle. “Never thought I’d serve a hero, a place like this.”

Sephiroth recited, “The pleasure is mine,” and nodded. The man lingered, staring at him in anticipation of his first sip. A strangled, confused sort of sound escaped Sephiroth throat before he raised the glass to his lips. “Uh… _Mm_ ,” Sephiroth offered, with an altogether bizarre level of demonstration; he could see that man’s desire to impress and felt a sudden, foreign instinct to appease him. Sephiroth’s sincere, albeit wooden effort had not obviously worked, the man walked away looking unsettled. He frowned and sipped the drink again. _It wasn’t bad_.

 _What had the rebel meant, that Shinra’s report of ‘brutal creatures’ once accompanied a full assassination attempt? Was it a coincidence that his last mission, that this mission, had contained those precise parameters? His orders made no mention of Genesis; had they sent Sephiroth to Nibelheim to stage a full-scale military assassination of his friend?_ Sephiroth quickly finished his drink. That didn’t make sense, but he felt in his bones that something was wrong. For the first time since his chthonic extrication from Jenova’s mind, Sephiroth felt like he was a puppet; that feeling was something he’d learned to trust, to move with, and move he did. Out of the inn, into Nibelheim’s afternoon sun.

Into warmth. Into rocks. 

“Hey, uh… where ya goin’?” 

Zack. Zack, coming back from somewhere, looking at him with that warm smile, with that admiring gaze. Sephiroth looked away. 

“To see the sights,” he muttered. 

“Want company?”

“No.”

* * *

Dusk, settling somber and soft over the fields of the Nibelheim Mansion. Peace setting down on endless forest, the night was heralded with the soft roll of fog. Sephiroth sat outside the convoy with an official Shinra laptop; He had guessed Elena’s password – alpha6t9— and gained access to the Turk’s shared drive. Black op directives, minimally redacted. He searched for any information he could find.

_Pursuant to [redacted] casualty analysis 381 detailing civilian impact of COASTAL INCURSION 1, SUBJECT 02-S has been classified psychologically unstable and a security risk of maximum priority._

His eyes widened. Their psychiatric analysis was dated the day of the Coastal incursion. _They had lied to him, all along. Shinra never believed his victims were insurgents, yet they had lied to him. They had celebrated him. Why— politics._ Sephiroth glared. _They’d spun his delusion into media truth to preserve their public image. They lied to him, they made him think… They made him it was true. That he had been right to claim those lives. Their lies had spun reality further from his grasp, their lies had exacerbated the vulnerabilities Jenova had seized in him._ He read on, though his mind was reeling. 

_Their report described violent, paranoid delusions. Psychosis, mood instability, possible diagnosis of Schizoaffective Disorder. Thought disorder, he saw, written over and over again. Delusional. High risk. No mention of trauma. No mention of their experiments, their culpability, his inscription into their army at the age of twelve. No mention of a lifetime of dehumanization and exploitation. They erased their culpability in their silence.  
_

TRANSFER ORDER: Location [redacted] codename ORPHANAGE, NIBELHEIM. Send military personnel ranking [redacted] minimum one hundred with mechanized SOLDIER units.

TARGET: GENERAL SEPHIROTH [redacted]

ACTION: delay action until after first contact with SPECIMEN JENOVA. TERMINATE WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE.

Tseng’s signature.

The President’s.

_Hojo’s._

The ground fell out beneath him. The air closed in. _It wasn’t Genesis’ assassination. It was his._

_Welcome to the end of the thought process._

Sephiroth remembered to breathe. He looked out across the field, in the direction the Nibelheim Mansion, the Orphanage, where enough troops to conceivably attempt his murder were presumably corralled, waiting for their kill order. _Why had they waited, why. They must have stayed there, hidden in the subterranean labyrinth beneath the mansion’s basement, the entire week he was in the library... Waiting… why?_

_First contact. Jenova. Why?_

Sephiroth’s expression barely changed; he stood with only the slightest flash in his narrowing eyes. 

They would not need to wait this time.

He was coming to them. 

* * *

She felt the impact. Her chest, stabbing, reverberating pain that crescendoed up and down the exquisitely sensitive bone of her ribs. The first strike hit before she knew where she was; as overwhelming and unexpected as it had been the first time around. As it had before, a high voltage blast from a line-up of MOTH units tore into her left side; they were fitted to rip apart tanks. She’d known something was wrong. She’d tried to guard; she barely managed. It tore apart her uniform: the warmth of the blood, the sight of her comrades coming apart in the light, hit her before the pain.

Aesis didn’t know if she was heartbroken or dying. Her chest felt hollowed out, bursting with a cutting warmth; she felt programmed to self-destruct. For a moment, as she saw the second voltage charge, she considered jumping into it. Unable to shake the feeling that she was supposed to die, Aesis watched the MOTH units release their final blast. She nearly froze. 

But she didn’t. 

She was in the air, dodging the second pulse; this time, her strength was fortified, her reflexes better honed. A succession of blades shot out after the pulse; circular saws flying boomerangs through the air that had once had taken off a piece of her earlobe. After she escaped Shinra, Aesis set the scars of that injury in custom jewelry, in gold and diamonds that filled in the flesh she’d lost that day. She rolled, this time fast enough to deflect the offending saw; when it was over, her hand reached reflexively for her ear and touched metal. Her ear cuff was still there. Aesis realized the rest of her outfit was different; silver pauldrons, shredded black turtleneck, _SOLDIER 1 st class. _The same clunky sword that haunted her early training; when she could finally wield it, she’d done so as a point of pride, as a badge of achievement. _The sword was trash;_ nonetheless, it was fitted with the right materia.

The MOTH units needed to recharge; their AI was vulnerable.

Aesis brought down enough lighting to tear the room apart and reconfigured the materia in her armor to grant her immunity to their most powerful hits _. She wouldn’t get through that day if electricity could affect her._ Magic fortified, she ran.

In the hallway corridor, she ran headfirst into him.

She remembered the man; the tenth in five hundred that died that day, after her nine comrades. The man who took her place in the line-up of fatalities, a SOLDIER who had once trained her. A six foot man, two hundred-ten, two-thirty; as a child she saw him as a skyscraper. She remembered him in flash-back; she’d been ten or eleven, backed in a corner of the Orphanage training rooms while that same man boxed her ears, screaming Goddess knew what about how _she’d cheated_ and _made a mockery of their training_ and _respect_ and _hierarchy_. She couldn’t feel it. She couldn’t really hear anything; she watched his lips move as he screamed. In those moments all that she was and all she lived was frozen in terror. Now it was his turn to be unarmed and paralyzed, backed in a corner. She watched him puff up, screaming orders at her with an authority whose entitlement only made her more murderous. 

The first time, she made him pay. When she finished he’d been unrecognizable. What that vengeance took of her soul was immeasurable. This time, it _felt_ different. He looked smaller, somehow. More pathetic. She didn’t have to go nuclear; he didn’t warrant it. He wasn’t worth it.

“Get out,” she warned him.

“I won’t let you get away with this.”

“Oh, _right._ Spare me your moral authority.”

This time, she put her sword away. 

“I wouldn’t want your dick to fall off because I know how to hold a sword,” Aesis smirked. “That would just be medically tragic. You want it?” she lifted her hands. “Take it.”

“Look, kid, I wouldn’t—” he stalled out. “I couldn’t—“

She chuckled. “Ooh, _kid._ How diminishing,” Aesis shook her head. “Your ego is writing checks your fists can’t cash.”

“You act like you know what you’re doing,” he sneered, dripping condescension, dripping contempt. “But we both know the truth. You really think you can take me, Aesis? Hand-to-hand?”

“I guess you’ll find out.”

She tracked him. Her eyes stayed on him as he barked some retort; she ignored it, following his movement with a searing, stilled focus that only unnerved him more. All Aesis did was allow the full and authentic energy of her fight to reach her eyes: the absolute and insane confidence she called on in battle, the berserk violence, the raw power; she watched him until she saw it. He flinched. A tenth of a second, he looked down. That was all she needed. He looked back immediately, red-faced and ready, puffed up in a six foot wall of muscle and rage to punish the fragility and ineptitude he immediately projected into her. It didn’t matter that he thought she was a fraud. _He had already broken._

She dodged a straight line of his punches, closing the distance head-on to back him into the corridor’s end. She never broke eye contact, and felt the near psychotic edge of that power; his frame seemed to shrink before her eyes. Within seconds, as she pushed him to the wall, he was too terrified to hold the full conviction of his form. She based out, twisting under his cross to send a hook so brutal she could hear his ribs snap. Any amateur would have caught broken ribs and a concussion in that split second; her trainer knew he had to choose. His hand scrambled to deflect her fist as it closed on his chin; she ducked under his arm again, opening his other side. She took more ribs and he buckled. Her next uppercut broke through his guard; it was a light switch. The man collapsed, all of his energy gone in an instant.

He looked deceptively peaceful. Aesis looked at him with a mess of guilt and wrathful vindication; she fought next to maneuver the emotion, fought to dodge the brutality of guilt. _Why guilt, if she had shown mercy? He still had his intestines. He would survive. Was that what she had to do? Spare lives?_ Aesis frowned. _Sparing lives would get her killed._

In the corner of her eye, a blur caught her attention. She chased the movement into an empty room and barricaded the door. A small girl turned, _the girl._ The girl who survived Corneo, but Aesis couldn’t quite draw her into focus. She saw red eyes flash, the monster’s visage. Aesis lifted the sword, squinting; in the monster’s thrall, the girl’s features were shifting. Where the monster’s form had taken a nebulous shape impossible to pull into focus, the girl’s features blended in different permutations until finally settling into Aesis’ own; with a crack, the monster was gone. Aesis’ jaw dropped; it felt as if she was staring in a mirror, staring at One, and it felt like a theft. All that was preserved of the girl Aesis remembered from the Nibeli forest, from Wutai, was the length of her hair; the tousles now mimicked Aesis’ shaping but had been hastily cropped, chopped, as if someone had gone at her with craft scissors. Aesis recognized that detail as well as any woman would; that girl’s hair had been hacked off to shame her. She felt intuitively that the monster’s power was capitalizing on that girl’s trauma; she had lost who she was, the dreams of who she could have been, in Corneo’s ring. The monster seemed to corrode anything left of her, the monster made her emptiness manifest. Perhaps all that was left to her was what she could steal. From One. From Aesis. Aesis frowned. _That couldn’t be true._

Aesis gritted her teeth. She understood the magnitude of loss that girl was facing. _Better Aesis’ face, better Aesis’ power, than the monster’s. Than Corneo’s._ Eyes narrowing, the former SOLDIER tilted her head. _Was stealing her face this girl’s way of bowing to the monster’s will, or usurping it? Both, perhaps. Perhaps that girl needed to absorb someone else’s power_ _before she could find her own._ God forbid the only power left to her be the entitled narcissism of the psychopaths who violated her. If that happened, her soul could well and truly be lost. 

Another glace at that girl’s expression and Aesis realized the kid would probably sell her soul in a heartbeat if it meant telling Aesis to fuck off.

_A compromise, then. Let it be clear who was who._

“You look like just me,” she let her aggravation reach her tone. Then, more softly: “Is there anything left of you in there?” The girl raged. Flashing teeth, Aesis’ own face charged at her. Murder. Attack. _Encore. Fantastic._

The first punch smacked into her thigh; she’d not bothered to block it, and she regretted that. For an eight year-old, the girl could hit. Aesis looked away, her hand on the offending limb, hissing an expletive she hoped would be more muted than it was.

_Ow._

“Blind rage and brute strength. Alright kid,” Aesis growled in reluctant recognition. “Maybe you and I have something in common.”

When she looked back the girl had a gun.

_Indeed they did._

_Fuck._

* * *

“Sephiroth,” he heard a whisper of his name on the wind and drew Masamune with vicious speed. The blade nearly nicked Zack’s throat, freezing the other man in place. “Hey,” Zack raised his hands. “Not… not trying to get decapitated, it’s just, you uh, seemed upset when you left.” Sephiroth stared at him, initially without any comprehension. His eyes narrowed; _was Zack… part of the assassination_? _He appeared so sincere._ “You followed me.” Zach nodded slowly. “You’ve been a little off since you got here, just, uh… just checking in.”

“You’re tracking me,” Sephiroth growled. “You’re a liar. You’re a part of this.”

“What? Sephiroth, I… I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Zack’s voice fell, Sephiroth heard sadness in it that tugged something in his chest. “Hey, I’m… I’m your friend. You’re looking at me like you don’t even know me.”

Sephiroth blinked.

 _I don’t know anyone,_ he wanted to say, but he realized that wasn’t true. Shinra’s lies did not wipe out the totality of every relationship he possessed; he could not have seen that before, Shinra _was_ the totality of every relationship he possessed. _Exactly,_ he countered himself, _Zack was a part of Shinra; of his own volition, and for all his goodness, he chose to kill for their colonial enterprise. It was only a matter of time before their lies would become his own._

“Prove it,” he hissed. “Prove you’re not lying to me.”

“I—“ Zack’s eyes searched his desperately. “Sephiroth, I’m… I’m putting down my sword, alright? I’m stepping away. I’m not armed. I’m asking you, as a friend, please just tell me what’s happening.”

Sephiroth’s eyes, jarring against the pastel twilight, seared into Zack’s own, burned hostile searchlights into the fabric of his soul. _He looked so sincere._ “Have you noticed, Zach, that since coming here, we haven’t actually seen any unusual monsters.” Zach’s discomfort visibly deepened. “I… yeah, I was wondering where they were. I thought maybe that dragon on the way…” Sephiroth sneered, “It’s not the _dragon_. Dragons are native to this region. The creatures we were sent for aren’t here. They’re corralled in refinement pods in the reactor; in the reactor they are already dead. This mission is a set-up.”

Zack's eyes widened. “What? Why?”

“Because two years ago I lost my mind,” Sephiroth answered softly, searching Zack’s response, “and was rewarded for it with the recognition you all so envy. What I did during the coastal invasion of Wutai was a massacre. I slaughtered civilians with delusional reasoning, I… They must have made me a hero to bury the truth, to build public opinion of SOLDIER. They were only biding their time.” Zack looked lost. “This is an assassination,” Sephiroth spelled out concretely. “Shinra has been planning my death since the end of the Wutai War.”

“What? I… I don’t believe that… No way. They…”

“Then you are naïve,” Sephiroth replied. “Naïve to believe in my heroism and naïve to believe in Shinra. We are weapons to them, nothing more. We are discarded when we break, and that day… I did break,” he admitted more quietly. “They see people as _capital,_ nothing more. I’ve seen you refuse that mentality, Zack … that’s why I… _might_ believe that you didn’t know.”

Zack was dumbfounded. “You think I’m here to assassinate you? Sephiroth, I… I didn’t… I didn’t know any of this,” he stumbled. “I didn’t…” Zack shook his head. “I don’t want to know this! I don’t want to know any of this.”

Sephiroth loosened his grip on Masamune’s hilt; he shook his head. “Why, Zack? I was forced into this enterprise. I have had no choice, I was made a murderer at twelve years old. Why would you _choose_ this?”

Zack swallowed. “I want to be a hero. I want to be strong.”

“Perhaps you truly were a friend to me,” he said softly, withdrawing his blade. “I become… paranoid… when I am enraged. When I face betrayal. I’m… sorry.” The words were awkward on his tongue, wooden in delivery; he hoped Zack would feel their authenticity.

“You don’t think I’m your friend now?”

“I assumed—”

“— Don’t, man. Don’t assume. I… I didn’t know that. I didn’t know you were twelve. That… That sounds really hard. I think I’d have lost my mind, too.”

* * *

A battalion was on its way and Aesis was staring down the barrel of child’s gun.

“So,” she observed. “You seem pissed at me.”

“I hate you!”

“What a refreshing change of pace.”

“Fuck you!”

“What did I do?”

“All I am is hate!” The girl screamed, finally. Aesis was taken aback; she was as impressed by the honesty as she was put on guard. “They took everything else! Everything else! I want to take _everything_ from you!”

Aesis stopped, waiting for the girl’s scream reached its crescendo, and breathed. “That's tough shit.”

The girl lunged again.

"So what,” Aesis sneered, fending off punches while she tried to keep the gun pointing away from them both, “So if I feel like someone stole everything from me, then I’ll know how you feel? If I feel shot, then I’ll know how you feel?”

The girl took as swing and stepped back, leaning against a wall. As Aesis’ words settled, she started to collapse, coming to sit on the floor.

“Oh well _okay_. This _heals_ ,” Aesis snapped. “What happened to you is not what happened to me, but you know what kid? The way this _feels_ is my _Tuesday before coffee_. You need to understand that _you cannot kill me_. This will not kill me.” The girl glared, pulled from her reverie by the challenge; she fired a shot, Aesis deflected it easily. “That is not an _option_ for you.”

In response, the girl put the gun to her own head.

“So one of us must die, and if it’s not me, it’s you?” Aesis stepped forward; the girl’s finger tightened jerked on the trigger, stopping just short of pulling it. Aesis froze. “I can’t reach you in time. I can’t stop you,” she realized.

“Then just die,” the girl pleaded; she realized that in demanding Aesis let herself be murdered, on some psychotic level the little girl truly thought she was begging for someone to save her life. She was acting out something, Aesis realized, some trauma she’d sustained in Corneo’s cruelty. She had no idea what surviving that ring was like, but Aesis thought back to her experience in the Orphanage. _One dies. One lives._

“No,” she answered gently. “It doesn’t have to be this way.” Aesis pressed her lips together. She could barely articulate what she wanted to say, let alone translate it for a child; the urgency of the moment broke through her hesitancy. The girl’s finger was moving. “Hey! Hey!” She hoped it would land. “You really want to kill someone right now, don’t you? Fuck, I…”

“Shut up,” the girl snapped. “You’re going to say that I’m a good girl and I don’t deserve to die, right? You’re going to say that everything’s going to be okay. Shut up!”

“Not at all,” Aesis swallowed. “I was going to say that will walk through this with you until the last moment. I will look this in its... face... with you. I _can_ help you stay safe, but if you decide to kill and die today… all I can do is keep you from being alone.”

“You’ll just watch?” The girl sneered, furious. “You _want_ to watch?”

Aesis felt a revulsion beyond anything she could articulate and whispered, “No, I don’t want to. Believe me when I say that I can.”

The girl stared, searching her. After a moment that seemed to stretch for eternity, with a look of accusation, of betrayal, finally, the girl dropped the gun.

Aesis breathed. “What’s your name?”

“Sometimes I’m called Ina.”

“Sometimes Ina,” her eyes widened; suddenly, Mari felt suddenly alive in that room. Aesis felt something stir inside her, a fury, a penance, a mandate to protect this girl’s humanity where she felt she had abandoned Mari’s.

“Does it hurt? When it heals?”

“Yes.”

She knelt to Ina’s level as she helped her find safety, nodding at the fissures in that little girl’s soul, at the hungry rage that seethed within her like a gangrenous sickness in a righteous wound. “ _Pour les filles qui doivent apprendre quand creér, et quand détuire_ ,” she whispered it as she turned. She stood, throwing the clunky SOLDIER-issue sword to the ground with disgust. Aesis summoned Saya. The katana fit her hand like a glove; it was an extension of her own body, its single frequency hummed in the air as the blade moved. “For the girls who must learn when to create _,_ ” she translated, “and when to destroy.”

She waited, watching the door where a few years earlier, she’d met her would-be executioners with dead eyes, with a cauterized soul. Now, she held a sword forged by the teacher who taught her to stand in unbroken dignity, positioned between Shinra’s army and a girl who survived. A girl whose face she could not see, but a girl clearly worth fighting for. She stood on an edge of terror, of resolute rage, of guilt. She stood on the edge of love, and thought first of Ina. That was the only love Aesis would accept from the bonds of trauma; what she felt for that child was swiftly becoming the fanged love of a mother wolf. She thought of Mari. Of Fifteen. Even Xavier. So many people, never given the chance to live.

Aesis thought of Sephiroth, of the way he listened to her, held her. What she felt for him was becoming a love of a different sort. She wanted to get back to him.

 _One lives, one dies._ She was facing Shinra’s world. Shinra’s stakes.

Then, she’d fought only for herself. She fought Shinra from their own sociopathic rulebook, brutal retribution exacted with their consciousness, with sadism and dead eyes. She’d felt nothing, nothing but calm, hatred and hollow. _She would feel this time,_ Aesis realized, eyes wide, eyes wet. _She could feel this time._ She didn’t need to degrade her soul to fight them. _Guilt and empathy would diffuse her hatred, coral her violence, they would limit her aggression to only what was necessary to survive._

_One lives, one dies. Mari. Ina. Her comrades. Herself. All targeted, all executed. She would feel every single life she took that day._

_She would kill them anyway._

The door flew open. Saya hummed.

Aesis’ eyes were alive.

* * *

In the Orphanage, Sephiroth fought. He won. It was a foregone conclusion. The violence felt confusing; without fully understanding what he was to do, he felt untethered, moving with uncertainty that pulled him to the reactor. He had sent Zack back to the inn, commanded him; he’d asked him to take Cloud – no, _to take infantrymen, he could not think about Cloud –_ and leave Nibelheim.

_If you take a scouting party out there, you could be signing their death warrant._

Shinra would try to tie up loose ends. He doubted fleeing Nibelheim would be enough to protect them, he doubted he could stop anything. If anything, Shinras efforts would be intensified by the carnage in the Orphanage. _He could not stop it. It was what happened to them._ Yet he tried.

Now he stood in the reactor, alone. Cloud, he could not think of. Zack, the friendship he had betrayed threatened to break his heart, to rake him in confusion, at a time he most desperately needed to keep his mind clear. _Genesis—_ Sephiroth shook his head. He stood in front of the closed door to Jenova’s tank with no desire to open it; _he could not feel her presence._ He knew, deep within him, that even if he did, her influence would not pierce him again. He waited, but he did not wait for Jenova, taking in the edifice that bore her name with absent eyes.

 _It had been beautiful, once. One day of a thousand had fueled him for years, years of unspoken hope, unspoken dreams. Somewhere north of Icicle Inn, in cold so biting they’d shared a tent, shared wine, then blankets, then a sleeping bag. The conversation flowed the way he dreamed love might, Genesis shared of himself with a vulnerability Sephiroth had never seen before, and would never see again, words painted poetry that he could feel on his skin, pain and passion that left him aching. That night, warmth; Genesis turned in his sleep and held him. He had never felt that before, another’s body pressed against his, fingers weaving through his hair, arms pulling him close against the heat of bare skin. The If only Genesis had not been asleep. If only…_ Sephiroth shook his head.

 _If only_ was not good enough.

His thoughts jumped to the kill order. _First contact with Jenova. Why?_

“I should have known,” Sephiroth whispered. “Jenova came alive when she felt me near her; that was what they wanted. My presence to pull her out of dormancy, to initiate the reunion; they wanted my longing for her love to cloud my mind. They were waiting for my grief. They were waiting to open fire while I stood reeling for her, desperate for my mother. Wondering if I was a human being.”

_They had not expected Nibelheim to be razed to the ground, they had not expected Cl... his death as it happened. They had not expected—_

A wing. Fire, flying at him. He dispelled it easily.

_— Genesis._

“No such luck. You are a monster.”

It was Genesis. In the flesh, fading to white, swagger undampened.

“I wondered where you were,” Sephiroth whispered, words smoldering under his breath. Behind him, _alive_ _._ His heart was racing. His chest hurt.

“Sephiroth, you were the greatest monster made by the Jenova Project.”

“What is the Jenova Project?” The ex-general asked coldly, reciting from memory, biding time. His head was spinning.

“The Jenova Project was the term used for all experiments relating to the use of Jenova’s cells… Hm. Poor little Sephiroth. You’ve never met your mother. You’ve only been told her name, no? I don’t know what images you’ve conjured up in your head, but… Jenova was excavated from a two thousand year-old rock layer. She’s a monster.”

Sephiroth scoffed.

_He could say that again._

“I need your help. My body is continuing to degrade. SOLDIER first class Sephiroth!” At those words, the ex-General remembered, his body had lifted to attention. His posture had righted. Reflexively. Thoughtlessly. This time, he stood still, trying to imagine a different set of orders. Nothing came, there was no one there. Shinra’s orders condemned him to death. Jenova’s stripped him of all Self, all dignity, all goodness. _What could he do?_

 _I’ll be here._ Her hand on his chest. Ungovernable warrior, softness in his arms. _Where was she, then?_ He wanted to keep the calm he’d had in that moment. The warmth he’d felt then. _What would she have him do?_ Sephiroth’s gaze hardened. _Something intolerably vague and unhelpful. Choose. Gods._

“Jenova Project G gave birth to Angeal, and monsters like myself. Jenova Project S used the remains of countless failed experiments to create a perfect monster.”

The first time, words had mangled in his mind. They came out _what do you want of me._ Then, he’d meant something deeper. He’d meant to ask what it was he could do. _What is that I can do?_ He’d been a desperate fool to ask Genesis, but he’d done it nonetheless.

“What do you want?” Sephiroth spoke numbly. _What could he do?_

“Your traits cannot be copied unto others. Your genes can’t be diffused. Therefore, your body cannot degrade. Share your cells with me. My friend, your desire is the gift of the goddess.”

He thought of Aesis’ words, as close to a directive as she’d ever given him. A challenge. _You seem disarmingly intelligent; you might try words._

Sephiroth spoke. “How is it you think I feel, hearing those words?”

Genesis was silent.

“You told me once that my heart is cold. Do you expect me to feel nothing at all?” Sephiroth shook his head, unable to shake the suspicion that Genesis simply didn’t care. “Yet you provoke me. You mock my yearning for a mother and tell me I’m a monster. You cut wounds into me as deep as any I have known, and then you ask for my help. How do you _expect_ me to react to this, Genesis?” Sephiroth was truly baffled, he felt the pain surge, run through him unobstructed. “ _How, Genesis_? I want to understand.”

“I didn’t mock you. I'm not _provoking_ you. I—”

— _It wasn’t going to be a conversation,_ Sephiroth realized, turning away in anger _. Genesis had no answers._ “I think you said these things to break me,” he realized, shaking his head as he thought back to it. “And Gods, did you succeed. It was in this moment, I broke. This moment. The confusion you stirred in me, the shame,” He closed his eyes. “The tragedy is that you didn’t need to break me, I would have given to you gladly.” He faced his fallen friend. “I loved you, Genesis,” he confessed it, finally. Words he’d held within him so long, stifled in shame and drowned in shallow waters. “I loved you,” he said again. “I would have felt this pain with you. I would have done anything I could to help you heal,” Sephiroth shook his head. “Can you only accept my love if you break me first, if you coerce it from me?”

“Then you withhold from me too? Hm,” Genesis scoffed, waved his hand in apparent indifference.

“What I… confessed to you,” he frowned. “You ignored it.”

“Are you really this sensitive, Sephiroth?” Genesis taunted. “I would have thought you better than that. You blindsided me with that, I don’t know what reaction you expected.”

“Huh,” Sephiroth chuckled humorlessly. “I blindsided you. That’s quite an accusation from a man who flew into this room to tell me I’m not human.”

“You don’t love me,” Genesis snapped. “If you did you’d help me—”

“—You’re right,” Sephiroth interrupted. “I don’t love you.”

For an instant, true agony cracked Genesis' cool façade.

“You are the architect of your own abandonment, Genesis.”

Genesis shook his head and sneered, “And now you dare blame me for your inefficacy. I didn’t think the great Sephiroth wouldn’t be quite this emotional. After all you have taken, I need your help—”

“On the contrary, I feel contained,” Sephiroth replied softly, watching Genesis’ speech become more erratic. _He wasn’t breaking, but perhaps, Genesis was_. _He had never seemed more fragile._ “ _You_ seem broken, you… seem lost. More than you ever have. You deserved better love than you were given, Genesis, you deserved credit you never received. I am sorry for what I took from you. But this… When I offer you love, you poison it. You make it contemptable. Even now, you need to break me, you need to force me to you on my knees.” Sephiroth scoffed. “Do you really see that ending well for you?”

The other man stared at him with rage burning his eyes, but stayed silent.

“I know what Project S is,” Sephiroth added, showing his hand with quiet resolution. “I don’t know if you believe what you’ve told me, or if your words are lies, intended to make me feel as degraded as you’ve become.” _You will rot._ “I cannot help you.” 

“I see. Perfect monster, indeed.”

Sephiroth looked at Genesis one last time. Red hair, azure eyes, his beauty left in bleached degredation. Sephiroth imagined warmth, he imagined Genesis’ lips against his own, moving in the intoxication of linseed oil and poetry; a harsh contrast to the cold he felt around them now. Soft moments of dignity and passion, dreams that would be put to rest in his mind, unspoken and unbroken. Perhaps the best of Genesis would be protected within them. Perhaps, he would decide those dreams had nothing to do with Genesis at all. There was one thing left to say.

“You are wrong.”

Sephiroth left.

As he did, he realized, _he felt warm_.

* * *

The explosions that wracked Junon Harbor tore Shinra’s base apart. A line of them, ripping through reinforced concrete and steel, gutted Shinra’s facilities and left the air a noxious cloud of dust and debris. The electric pulses Shinra’s MOTH units sent after her were ineffectual at best; if anything, their high voltage attacks seemed to fortify her. The blades ricocheting through the air turned to flame as they collided with her molten sword. The great and destructive power of Aesis’ magic was on full display; that day, Shinra harbor became a primordial landscape, a forge. Ground shifted on rivers of fire, flames seared away Shinra’s decay.

Aesis stepped through the fire, her sword in one hand, a child in the other. The monster was no where in sight; its hatred and dominion had receded. As she settled into a place to hide, it was clear the child with her, a child who still bore precariously close resemblance to Aesis’ younger self, was not giving up her newfound mask.

“Alright, Sometimes Ina,” Aesis murmured, reslotting her materia. “We got out. I know that monster’s out of you. Now give me back my face.”

“I want it.”

Aesis stared at the girl.

“Give me back my face.”

“I want it.”

“It’s my _face_!”

Ina glared up at her without a modicum of shame.

“I need it and you still have one.”

Aesis opened her mouth for a smart reply but found none available. “I… _what?_ ” She shook her head. The girl smiled as her adversary and rescuer made a series of noises that recalled a furious tea kettle. “ _Dear Gods_ , you are a _pain_ ,” Aesis snapped. “You’re… you know what? You’re right. Fine. You’re not actually taking anything from me. Keep the stupid face.”

Silence curdled in the tension between them. 

“You’re welcome.”

Ina said nothing; the ex-SOLDIER watched Ina’s expression take on a proud sort of irritation. It was a pyrrhic victory; the face’s appeal seemed to diminish with its explicit availability. 

“You know, at the end of the day you’re not going to want my face as much as you want your own.” 

The girl glared at her. “But you’re like the men who took me,” she said. “They were so strong, and you’re strong too. I wanna be like you.”

“Gods,” Aesis realized. “You think I’m like them,” Aesis shook her head, swallowing bile. “You’re wrong,” she said firmly. “I can kill them, but I’m not the same. I feel empathy. I feel guilt. I truly give, like I _just_ gave you my entire stupid face.” The girl stared at her like she was speaking a foreign language. “The men who took you don’t feel right or wrong, they just take and take, they can’t function otherwise. They feel no remorse, no guilt. Empathy. Guilt. Do you know what that means?” 

The girl turned to outrage, and beneath it… terror. “What do you _mean_ you’re not like them? I thought you were… I thought you could _..._ ” she stalled out, apparently betrayed. Apparently afraid. Aesis arched her eyebrows.

“You have really got a lot going on upstairs, don’t you?”

Ina glared, but seemed to calm down. A little. Exhaling loudly, Aesis tried again.

“You said you wanted to take everything from me. You already took everything from Corneo’s men. The men who took you. Did you feel the power?”

She watched her own features split apart in a sadistic grin and felt a chill. _Yes, then. Ina felt power. That sort of power would relieve the incredible shame, the inarticulable helplessness, of what she had survived. But in the long term, it would poison her. It would leave her empty._

“The power didn’t fill you up, did it?” The grin faded. No response. Aesis swallowed. “It’s a cycle,” she said. “You’ll be empty, and you’ll take, and you’ll feel that horrible satisfaction, and for a moment,” she offered a half smile, “you’ll be a God, Ina. But when it’s over, it’ll just make you emptier, and emptier, and emptier. It’s a desperate, joyless life.”

The girl stared and Aesis realized she didn’t understand.

“You will never have a happy ending.”

The girl looked away.

“Did you feel the guilt?” 

Nothing.

“Do you feel hurt?”

“No,” the girl snapped defensively. “Stupid bitch.”

“Stupid bitch, huh?” 

“You said a bad word!” the girl screamed the accusation, pointing at Aesis. 

“I did. So did you. Hm,” Aesis observed. “Even though you don’t feel it, it looks like what they took from you does hurt… the _biggest_ hurt,” Aesis looked out over Junon’s sunset, squinting in the sun’s dying rays. “When you can feel your own pain, when you understand your own pain, you’ll feel guilty when you hurt other people. Even if you have to.”

The girl’s glare intensified, but for a fraction of a second, her expression changed. Her eyes glanced downward down, her forehead tensed. A frown pulled her mouth onto the verge of what could have been a sob—

“— There it is,” Aesis said. “ _That._ That looked like guilt. See? You _can_ do it.”

“No,” the girl muttered, hiding her face. 

“I saw what I saw. You’re not all bad, kid.”

“The men who took me were crying, when…” Ina said finally. “I cried too. They did the same thing when I hurt them that I did when they hurt me.” 

“Yeah, guilt.” Aesis offered softly. “You’ve been hurt, and you hurt people, and you feel very bad. So do I,” She breathed. “Ina, you saved your own life. We have that in common. We were both in situations where we had no choice but to fight. You didn’t have to hurt them the way you did, and you’ll live with that. You won’t do it again.” Aesis pressed her lips together. “You saved your own life. You survived.”

“Am I a monster?”

Aesis breathed, “You’re still human.”

“No! I hate this. I hate it! How does it go away?” the girl screamed at her. “How?”

“Time,” Aesis replied gently. “It gets softer with time. You learn to build joy. You learn to build peace. I’m giving to you right now, and when the time comes, when you’re healed enough, you will give to someone else. That fills you up. You can learn to fight without being empty, without taking _everything_ , and that helps too. And when the time comes you can control who you’re around, you’ll learn how to stay away from men who will make you a murderer.”

The girl nodded, wiping tears. “I want out. I want out of this.”

“So do I.”

"... I'm keeping your face."

She laughed. "Go nuts."

“What now?”

Aesis exhaled abruptly.

“There’s a man out there who... when he sees me, he makes me feel human. His giving helps me heal, helped me get us out of here safe. And right now something's trying to hurt him.”

She drew her sword.

“We’re going to help him.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed it! 
> 
> EDIT: I feel weird writing OCxOC scenes, since it ostensibly risks stepping pretty far from the game. Ultimately, though, I'm writing Ina with Sephiroth's psychology in mind, as well as Genesis', Scarlet's and Aesis' and Mari's. At least right now, she's meant to be more of an archetypal component of all of their characters: a very wounded inner child, a beating heart of this sort of reaction to trauma. The conversation at the end between Ae and Ina isn't supposed to be 100% realistic, as I imagine that sort of conversation would actually take years in real life and an eight year-old would understand very little of what Ae says. It's meant to be a bit unrealistic and save Ina years of suffering that aren't always possible to prevent in real life; call that sincere wish fulfillment on my part.
> 
> Up next: I'm going to finish Original Sin, and heat things up a little bit for the holidays. Will Ae and Seph's relationship develop healthily, or will the ghosts of their past come back to haunt them? Will there be sin? Check back Mondayyy *finger guns*


	18. Nibelheim Files, Episode 4: Original Sin, part 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aesis and Sephiroth are sucked back in time for their final battle with the monster; finally, they confront their feelings for each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Graphic violence, discussion of brainwashing. References to child sex trafficking and abuse, medical and physical abuse. One character in this chapter, Ina, a survivor of Corneo's trafficking ring, is designed with Dissociative Identity Disorder specifically in mind, but a lot of the chapter and story is written to reflect themes of dissociation and complex trauma. The myth Aesis references in this chapter is the story of the Egyptian goddess, Isis. It's written to be similar to the real myth, and the real-life mythology is sometimes described as a metaphor for Dissociative Identity Disorder. 
> 
> I realized as I was writing this that in the last chapter, I forgot to write out a few flashbacks in the build-up to Junon. Specifically signs that Ae missed leading up the execution, things that could have helped her figure out something was wrong. I want to illustrate that signs were there, but she was too brainwashed to register them. My idea for her chracter is that Shinra's brainwashing left her unable to trust her own mind, which is a huge obstacle for her to overcome in trusting her feelings for Sephiroth. If you're new here, this story explores a wide range of trauma, but for me brainwashing is the hardest thing to write of all of it >.<. Oops. I'll add that in. 
> 
> No illustrations, that was just too much this week. 
> 
> The playlist for Original Sin can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5VbaUb1BfuXCiUcPuG0tca?si=scxzOs5HTWSG6Me6cePvGw).

_A girl. Young, too young, somewhere time was shattered, folding in on itself._

_Multidimensional projections onto four-dimensional space._

_The lens of a Shinra helmet; the soldier’s face obfuscated by armor. Around him she saw floral wall paper, thick ivy, a home kitchen. Nothing near the cupboard, a cupboard with doors padlocked shut; there, the walls there were bare. Get out. The girl was hesitating… Trembling. Get out. A boy’s voice, disembodied. They’ll kill you, his voice echoed on the pulse of a heartbeat. Run._

_Wisps of blonde hair pulled up on her head, her face, smudged with dirt and blood, streaked with tears and sweat._

_Soft, buckling knees._

_Fingers grasped at a dodging white orb suspended in a pool of blood. Beside it, a man’s head, ripped open in the back; the little girl’s eyes rubbed raw from crying. Gunshots sounded somewhere, everywhere, screams. Blood was in her hair, it matted her curls to her head._

_Her soft cheeks quivered._

_Small hands, soft fingers in maladroit articulation, tightening around a glowing orb of materia. A face; white shapes whose blurring edges danced, it was impossible to discern its features. She saw the blurred shadows of rabid eyes, a miasma of lips, moving. The lips were barking, but the little girl was paralyzed, she could hear nothing, she could feel nothing, save the pressure of a rhythm, her own heartbeat pounding outside of her like a drum reverberating through a wind tunnel. Her head was bowed; suddenly, she could lift it. She stared up coldly into rabid eyes. The orb was changing color, swirling red._

_The little girl, leaning against wallpaper as the door before her shut, her little fingers reaching forward, futile grasps at lonely air; then sudden, total release: the relief of a child’s mind cleaving apart._

_A shadow looked down at her._

_…hell do you think you’re doing?_

_The little girl was defiant. Her features, shaped with the softness of a porcelain doll, fell away, enveloped in fury that burned from the doll’s exposed, hollow core. Her fury was like a shark rising from the ocean’s depths, its power cracked the veneer of helplessness that veiled her doe eyes. Her features fell away, enveloped in calm fury that burned from her exposed, hollow core, its power cracked the veneer of helplessness that veiled her doe eyes. Sudden, total release: the relief of a child’s mind cleaving apart. At last, the little girl found something to hold onto. No fear. No pain. Power. Something to hold onto. Her stained, small fingers tightened their grip on the red materia, pulling it from a puddle of blood._

_A storm was coming._

_Get out. They’ll kill you. Run._

_A heartbeat rocked the little girl’s body as she turned to run; she heard her own pulse outside of her, whirring like a drumbeat siphoned through the reverberations of a wind tunnel. A screech rained down, an unworldly force ripped the air apart. Napalm skies were exploding overhead, the ground was erupting in flames. Bodies caught in a blast of fire, their shadows incinerated as they screamed._

_You’ll burn._

_The little girl looked at the wall of fire that pinned her to an alley corner, held out her hand. She could feel warmth on her fingers. Her hand froze; God, the shame those soft, ineffectual, insufficient fingers would feel when flames seared them to the bone, cracked them apart like excoriated husks. She was there, not there; at the same time, she was dead and alive, at the same time. Flames._

_Get out. They’ll kill you. Run._

“No,” Aesis whispered.

_Napalm skies were exploding overhead, the ground was erupting in flames. Bodies caught in a blast of fire, their shadows incinerated as they screamed._

Aesis wrapped herself around Ina and rolled.

Napalm skies were exploding overhead, she saw fire, heard screams, smelled death. _Nibelheim?_ She didn’t believe it, she’d felt no real concern that Sephiroth would burn down the mountain town again _. This wasn’t Nibelheim._ Aesis took stock of her surroundings. Long grass. Arched rooftops, dominant on the small-town landscape, pulled to a triangle point. _Wutai._

Aesis leapt to her feet and ran, with Ina holding tight to her shoulders; the girl was too confused to do anything else. The sky split overhead, white light exploded around her and she heard a sound like a crack in the sound barrier, wind whorled like an aircraft taking off next to her ear. Her materia, embedded in her chestplate, was glowing of its own accord. _How?_

“Sephiroth!”

She saw him. He stood with his back to her, the broad white steel of his pauldrons, the embellished leather of his jacket, all reflecting the inferno around them. He turned.

“Aesis.” He moved toward her, caught them both in his arms. She felt his warmth, she felt an unnamed tension that had coiled in her chest release in his arms. She opened her mouth to ask if he was alright, but he interrupted her. “How… One?” He was staring at Ina, his eyes large. She stared back at him. “Are you the man she likes?” Already taken aback, his expression doubled. “This is Ina,” Aesis explained. “The girl who survived Corneo. The monster gave her use of my face and she’s decided to hold onto it for a while.”

“I want his,” Ina scrunched her nose. “It’s prettier.”

They stared at each other for a moment before Aesis regrouped. “Where are we?” She cried out. “I’ve dreamt of this, Sephiroth, I’ve imagined this place. Did you come here? During the war?”

Explosions. Screams. Sephiroth shook his head. “Yes,” he said finally. “This is Vesuva.” Aesis stared at him.

“ _The_ Vesuva? You were at _Vesuva?_ Did you—”

“I didn’t do this,” he replied. “I didn’t do this.” Concentration furrowed Aesis brow, her hand moved to her chest plate, to the red materia whose uncalled iridescence still lit up the space between them. “Then I think I know what did. Come on.” She ran, leading them through the burning landscape, dodging SOLDIER thirds fleeing, dodging the exploding paneling and shattering windows of houses and storefronts whose burners caught in the blaze.

 _There._ By a SOLDIER’s body, in a puddle of tissue and blood that had erupted from the back of his head. A little girl squatted, reaching for a glowing red orb. The materia on Aesis’ chest plate began to hum, a single, haunting frequency that drowned out the sounds of the carnage around them. The girl looked up, but her face was shadow.

“Wait!” Aesis screamed as the child’s features blurred into a miasma of shifting, inscrutable shapes, pulling further away from her focus with every effort to see her. “Who are you? _Who are you?_ ” The girl’s shadow turned, moving toward an alley in a halting, shifting pace. “Stop!” Aesis screamed. “Stop! You’ll burn!” She lunged forward, but Sephiroth was holding her back.

“Aesis,” he said her name in a steady tone while she twisted against the strength of his arms.

“Aesis.”

“ _What?_ ”

“The monster.”

The monster was in front of them. “Oh fuck.” Cracking light. Nebulous, tornadic shadows lit aglow in the orange sky. Those menacing eyes, violent teeth. “You can’t hold her and fight, Aesis,” Sephiroth said the obvious. “I’m not letting her go,” Aesis frowned. _Ina wouldn’t be safe._ “It can work. You cut,” she recited the words from intuition, from the pieces of a memory that had returned to her as she worked through his memories of the war. “Remember? You cut, I fire.”

“The improvisations of a warrior poet,” Sephiroth’s eyes narrowed. He couldn’t remember exactly what had happened, but the words came from a sort of memory stored in his bones and Sephiroth knew he’d spoken them before. “We fought this monster already,” he said quietly. 

“I think so,” Aesis confirmed. “And we beat it.”

“Mm,” he murmured, stepping forward. A switch flipped in his eyes, his smug smirk danced as he readied Masamune, his entire body coiling in preparation. His body knew what to do, and he trusted it utterly. “It will be my sincere pleasure," he said calmly. "Are you ready?” Aesis held Ina in one arm and ducked, dodging the monster’s teeth. “Go!” She let loose an inferno that concentrated the wrath of the flames around them onto the monster’s shifting form. Sephiroth was already in the air, an orchestra of lethal steel and brutal power as he rained blow after blow down into the blaze. Aesis held out her hand, readying more fire.

She saw the monster lurch. The ground fell underneath them, consumed in the blaze. Shadow closed in and they were in freefall, into endless abyss. “Sephiroth!” She screamed, watching him slip away. Everything went black.

When she opened her eyes she was staring at the ceiling of a room she didn’t recognize. Aesis jerked up, calling out, and made immediate impact with Tifa’s arm, the smack of her armor hit Aesis’s chest. “Ae.” The prosody of Tifa’s voice was slowed, balancing out the erratic speed of Aesis’ gasped breathing. “Ae, you did it. You’re back. You’re back.”

“It’s over.”

Tifa was yelling out for Vincent, yelling out for their Medbot. For Aesis, everything was a blur. It took her time to realize where she was, when she was, to realize that it was over; _tomorrow was Krampnach,_ she heard them say, it was a holiday. Her breath deepened, steadied, she felt the texture of the blankets around her and tried to focus on _what was real._ Blankets. Cold room. Tifa. Snow. _Snow?_ At some point, Vincent and Tifa had booked rooms at the Nibelheim Inn, she learned. That was where she was now. An unexpected and unseasonal blizzard had overtaken Nibelheim that morning, she learned, while she'd laid in that room. They had only been out a few days, it was still too early for winter weather. But it was snowing. As time and space settled around her, he heard Vincent call out something that contained Sephiroth’s name and pushed Medbot’s mechanized arms away. “Where is he? Where’s Ina?”

She almost fell of the bed, running to them. They were fine, and after a few minutes Vincent pulled Tifa and Ina out of the room, leaving Sephiroth and Aesis alone.

She expected it to go differently. It felt warm at, the way they were. She felt close to him. Then she asked him about Nibelheim and suddenly, his expression changed. His softness took on an abrupt, hard edge and Sephiroth withdrew, staring at her as if she were another person.

“Leave me alone,” he snapped, turning his back to her.

Aesis was stunned. “What?”

“Leave me.”

She did.

* * *

“Aesis, I kind of thought you’d be spending the night… somewhere else.”

Madam M, Aesis, and Tifa were lost in conversation in the Inn’s restaurant, weapons hastily scattered around a booth table, interspersed with exhausted glasses of eggnog. Medically, Aesis was fine, they established that much. Emotionally, she had no idea, so she reached for a handful of peanuts and spoke wryly, popping one in her mouth. “So did I.” She motioned for the bartender, her fingers offered a slurred gesture for his attention that lingered too long on his lapel. “More drunk please. Bourbon.” The man bolted with a hasty nod, Aesis recounted for the other women what had happened in Sephiroth's room. She raised what remained of her fourth eggnog in a toast.

“Happy shitty, sexless holiday.”

“Here, here,” Tifa laughed without humor. “Maybe he's just overwhelmed, you know. You guys were gone a long time, it sounds like a lot happened."

"Maybe," Aesis frowned.

"To Sephiroth," Tifa continued, "now the reformed and fierce revolutionary fighting valiantly for the resistance,” she shook her head, “while Cloud fucks off who knows where. What is this life.”

“He hasn’t actually said that’s what he wants,” Aesis pointed out. “Sephiroth, I mean.”

Madam M snorted in her own refined way. “I think what he wants is obvious, Aesis.”

The bruise Sephiroth's abrupt rejection had left on Aesis’ ego stung. “Is it? Even if… I don’t know. You know the feeling,” her hands gestured in the air, motioning at her throat, “that sick feeling you get when someone’s greenlighting you into their childhood trauma and you can tell that it’s still so fucked up, even though it’s ostensibly consent?”

Madam M smirked. “I run a multi-million gil business on the back of that feeling.”

“ _Oh,_ ” Aesis intoned, glaring. “ _Fuck_ , Mimi. _No._ ”

“We’ve all been used, Aesis. We all play it out, and we all sell bodies to it in one way or another. Or is it only a pure coincidence that in your liberation from SOLDIER, you became Wutai’s warrior? My business, like yours, is as moral as its ethics are dubious.”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but she has a point,” Tifa observed. Aesis rolled her eyes but appeared to concede. When she finally spoke, she routed the conversation back.

“Be that as it may, I'm not interested in building a relationship on the foundation of that feeling. it would have to _feel_ right. I have to believe in it. It's a moot point anyway, that wasn't a green light. Or a red light. That was a cease and desist order, that was... Maybe the waiter can just bring the bourbon.”

“So what do you believe in, then?”

“Mm,” Aesis dodged the question. “I believe in eggnog.” The women raised their glasses in agreement.

“You said before that you were afraid,” Tifa was slipping in the nog’s lull and slurred her words as she remembered it. “Yew’were afraid you weren’t strong enough. Now you’re glib. What changed, Ae?”

Madam M arched her eyebrow. Aesis snorted. “Nothing changed, I’m just salty as hell. He told me to leave him alone, no explanation, nothing. So I’m defensive, but deep down I’m still… terrified. Fuck.”

“But you’re like him that way,” Tifa frowned.

“Salty?”

“No, I mean, yes, but no, I mean, you took your mind back. You put yourself back together. You fought to heal. That’s… real.” Her words weaved in a drunken, disinhibited sort of concern; it was so unintentionally thick that it reminded Aesis of a self-help guru’s infomercial. “You deserve love, Aesis, and I… I love you.” Aesis stared. “I love you, and I want you to be loved, good love, even if it’s,” Tifa stretched out her arms, “totally fucked up.”

“Uh huh.”

“Seriously.”

“In Junon…" Aesis groaned and put her head in her hands, waiting a moment before she came up for air. "I lost so much of what I thought was real that day, except… horror. The horror. The _hollow._ I was _delusional_ , Tifa… I was _brainwashed_ , and when I saw through it there was nothing but horror and hollow. I sacrificed my mind to try to feel this… fabrication of love. It left me so helpless. I'd forgotten how it felt, standing in front of that MOTH Unit while they died. I almost let it kill me.” She shook her head. “I cannot ever be that way again. I’m so scared. Tifa, _I’m scared._ For fuck’s sake.” Aesis turned her head, Tifa could see a tear on her eyeline. Aesis breathed.

“Had you met my inner demons yet, Mimi?”

Madam M made a face. “Who _brainwashed_ you?”

“Shinra… it’s the hardest thing to think about. But that was how I knew love. Love was the lie you struggled to hold onto after years of torture and manipulation; it was the salve that masked every rape, every broken bone, every… every murder. It was the message that you were an object, a weapon, that you had no purpose but to kill and be killed, to be used and thrown away when you broke. What they did to my mind was the worst of it, for me. It’s… I’m terrified of feeling this. Tifa, I… ”

Tifa sighed. “Gods, Ae, you must care about him.”

“Yes, but… fuck … maybe there’s a point where it’s just too late. What’s the point of wanting it?”

“Do you? Want it?”

“I can’t,” Aesis shook her head. “I could lose my mind.”

“You do,” Tifa’s eyes were sad. “Shit, you do.”

“You’ve already lost your mind,” Madam M spoke with disdain.

“You’re an absolute bitch, Mimi, you know that?”

“Ae,” Tifa interrupted. “He’s probably afraid of the same thing… He’ll probably understand what you’re saying better than I do. Maybe when he calms down you two could talk about it, navigate the fear together?’

“Ugh,” Aesis groaned, wiping her eye with her fingertip. “Gross.”

Madam M interjected. “No, you’ve lost your mind. It baffles me to watch one of the greatest warriors of our age brought to her proverbial knees because she’s afraid loving someone will strip her reality testing. Have you not lost _all awareness_ of the power you built since you were in SOLDIER? All awareness of the capacity you have built to process reality in extreme stress, in extraordinary pain? It’s as if you are slipping five years in the past, Aesis. Thus, I say again, and I am right: You have already lost your mind.”

Aesis glared and pointed at Madam M, nodding slowly.

“Well that's still rude,” Tifa glared. “How about… You were basically a kid. You needed to distort reality to survive, you know? You couldn’t escape Shinra then. You are so fucking powerful now. You _escaped_ , you deprogrammed yourself, you wage war, Aesis. You don’t need to lose your mind to love another person, not anymore.”

“Mm,” Aesis nodded. “ _Yes,_ that… Mm.” She sighed. “Yes, if it comes to that, yes, I can fight my way out of it. I just..." She shook her head, biting her tongue as the bartender served their next round. Aesis drank long. "I don’t want it to come to that. I think the scariest thing is that there were signs, looking back, that nothing good was going to happen that day. None of us saw it coming. I realized at the last possible second, and the others… They were being killed and they didn’t believe it was happening. So yes, I can escape, and fight, but I don’t want it to come to that.”

“You want to see the signs.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“You know, if it helps,” Tifa sighed. “I do think he’s different. He’s made different choices this whole time. He’s still awkward and brooding and there’s no apology for what he's done that’s enough, nothing he can say, but he’s been furious and he’s flash-backed and every time, he’s made different choices. I do think he’s really changed.”

“I haven’t seen him pissed at _me_ yet,” Aesis frowned. “I guess I am now. He seems to become quite cold.”

“What did you do?”

She shrugged, “Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Is _this_ a red flag?”

Aesis sighed in frustration, shrugged. “Maybe that’s what I’m worried about. I should talk to him.” She took another sip and leaned into Madam M’s shoulder. “It’s definitely not because I’m not _devastating_ , though, right? Like, if you were…” Her hand waved in the air across the draping of Madam M’s kimono, “less you… you’d totally think I’m devastating.”

Madam M arched a hostile eyebrow. Her inebriation was revealed in her pause, in the sloppy way she leaned forward, but no amount of nog was enough to shake the contemptuous elegance from her speech. “Aesis, if I… hem… if I was less _me_ I would say I’m often torn between murdering you with my teeth and taking you to bed to fuck you until neither of us knows our name.”

Aesis didn’t miss a beat: “Because I’m _devastating_?”

“Oh fine,” she hissed. “Because you are devastating.”

“Mm. I feel better.”

Madam M rolled her eyes.

The conversation turned then, rerouting to Ina. Folia was coming for her the next day. There was no guarantee that the new Leaf House could help her, it wouldn’t be the first time a kid with a mind as shattered as Ina’s grew to find some peace in the community Folia had built for ostracized and discarded children. Madam M seemed to hold the majority of the skepticism that anyone could help Ina, which only built as she inquired more about girl's condition. The fault lines of that girl’s mind, fissures in bedrock that erupted in flames, her namelessness within them. Aesis wondered if, like Mari, Ina had created others within herself who could feel what she’d endured instead of her. Madam M interrupted with a hostility that felt personal.

“I wonder that she could ever heal.”

“I bet you do,” Aesis replied. “You still view people as capital, Mimi, you still invest, in every sense, in the limitations of Corneo’s worldview. Bodies to sell. I adore you tonight, I do, but I still think you fundamentally misunderstand what it is to be a human being. _Corneo_ wouldn’t heal from this,” she added. “But I don’t have his limitations. Neither does Tifa, neither does Folia. Ina is not bound by them simply because you choose to be.”

“Hmph,” Madam M scoffed. “A flattering overture from someone asking for my filthy rich help.”

“If memory serves” Aesis smiled softly. “You came to us for help.”

That was how the subject of their next mission came up. The mission after whatever dealing with Corneo would entail, their plan to infiltrate Shinra’s base in Midgar. It was risky to go undercover, even for a short time, but they’d done it before on a smaller scale. Careful hacking, disguise, and the help of one other.

“He got in touch,” Tifa sipped. “While you were… under. Our man on the inside. We’ll need bio-encrypted IDs, but he’ll help us once we get in.”

“I’ve been in touch with my bio hacker,” Madam M added. “I’m ready to honor our deal.”

“Is it as bad as we feared?”

“Yeah,” Tifa’s voice was heavy. “They’re operational. Shinra tower is back in business, Midgar is on full lockdown. Martial law.” She shook her head. “But they’re still scrambling to regroup. It’ll be easier to slip in their system in the chaos. Vincent volunteered to go find Cloud, but I think he wants to make sure Sephiroth’s okay before he leaves. He stayed with him, you know, the whole time.”

“He cares about him,” Aesis nodded. “I’ll tell him that Vincent stayed with him, I doubt he thinks anyone did.”

“Yeah.”

“That leaves three of us to infiltrate. We can split it—”

“—I’ll take SOLDIER.”

Aesis blinked.

“Repeat that, Tif,” she followed, “because it sounded like you just said something crazy.”

“I’m dead serious,” Tifa replied. “Since we came here, Ae, I’ve been thinking… Twenty years ago Cloud and I were sitting on the town windmill, and he told me he wanted to be a great hero, just like General Sephiroth,” She glared pointedly. “Hindsight 20/20 there are about a thousand different things I wish I’d said in response to that, but what I did say was, _if I ever need you to protect me, will you come_? Ever since then, deep down, I’ve been hoping for a SOLDIER to rescue me. Cloud. You,” She looked at Aesis. “If I’m really honest, I do the same thing with you. Part of me waits for you to save me… that’s all I did while you were unconscious. I sat and I waited.”

“Tifa,” Aesis interrupted.

“I’m not done. In the reactor, there was a part of me that wished you could be there to rescue me,” Tifa scowled. “And what I felt when you came back and you’d rescued _Sephiroth_ instead… And _Nims_!” Tifa laughed bitterly. “I would have died on that table without you, without _Sephiroth_. And _now_ Shinra’s made monsters that can hurl us through the fabric of space and time? I’m sick of _waiting_. If this has to be what the world is, I want to be strong enough to fight through it without needing some genetically engineered _wunderkind_ with childhood trauma to come rescue me.”

“Tifa… The mako, the tests will all be real. The _torture_ will be real.”

“Oh please. I am… increasingly aware of my ability to survive torture. SOLDIER, Ae. I want to save my damn self.”

“I—”

“—I said put me in it, Aesis.”

Aesis looked at Tifa; she recognized a determination in Tifa’s eyes that could give Sephiroth a run for his money. Tifa had always internalized the idea that she needed to be saved, and Aesis watched her challenge it, finally, with a quality of respect that was unlike the respect she’d held felt for her friend before.

“Welcome to SOLDIER, Tifa Lockhart.”

The women raised their glasses. Three eggnogs collided in the space between them, heavy and musical.

* * *

She wasn’t sure how many drinks she was in when she walked back into his room, but the server was avoiding her when she asked for one more, something warm to bring him. Sephiroth stood in his room with his back to her, facing the window. He was watching the snow fall, the unexpected blizzard, snowflakes softly reflecting the street lights as they drifted peacefully downward.

“Are you mad at me?” She asked.

No response.

“You know this stonewall thing you do is a little exhausting. We’re having eggnog, if you want to—”

“—You didn’t tell me, but you knew. You knew that it was a trap,” he interrupted. “Nibelheim was a set-up, an assassination. Hojo believed that the emotional impact of finding Jenova would make me easier to kill; his plan was to use me to lure her out of her dormant state, then have Shinra’s army… terminate me. I think they intended to throw me, or… Jenova… into the lifestream, to initiate the reunion. You knew.”

“I… Yes, I did. I assumed you did too, Sephiroth. Wasn’t it in your file? I…” Aesis swallowed. “Oh. Do you feel like I set you up?”

“Yes. I…” Sephiroth stopped. “You thought it was in the files? At the mansion?”

“Yes, I did. You reacted to those files so violently, I assumed that was… at least part of what you were responding to.”

“No. It wasn’t in my file.”

“Oh,” Aesis breathed.

“You were lied to your whole life,” she said finally. “Shinra’s culture is one without any real or equitable accountability. I understand why you might… assume it’s pointless to ask me for the truth, assume I’m withholding it from you intentionally… I didn’t mean to make you feel that way, I am sorry I did.” She added, “We could have just talked about it.”

“You didn’t know.” He murmured, shaking his head. “I… I made an assumption as well, then. I’m sorry, I…. was rude to you, I...” He closed his eyes. _Paranoia. It had gotten the best of him._ “Is this very bad?”

“A misunderstanding?” Aesis exhaled abruptly. “No, for me it’s not a big deal. It depends on you, and you can be... exquisitely judgmental, I think. So if you feel it’s very bad... What… what do you feel, Sephiroth?”

He wasn’t sure if he could trust the sense that she was asking about something deeper. Sephiroth turned away.

“What I feel is a complicated question,” he replied under his breath. Then: “I want compassion. That's what I want to feel."

“I’d appreciate it,” Aesis stepped. “I, um, brought you an eggnog. Happy Krampnach.” Sephiroth’s eyes narrowed as he accepted the beverage. “Tomorrow we’ll set up as much of a holiday as we can,” she smiled. “A handful of rebels and a brothel madame might not have the easiest time with wholesome, but we want to try to give Ina one memory that resembles a normal childhood.” She pressed her lips together. “I hope you’ll come.”

He turned the drink in his hands, frowning. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t know how to contribute. In the labs, they… They did celebrate, but it was not… Hojo gifted me a protractor, once, that is all I remember. It felt very cold.” He swallowed. “On the battlefield… that should not be replicated for a child. Angeal and Genesis, they did eventually, but… I apologize, I—” Sephiroth turned away, catching his breath. _Was he near tears?_ “Thank you, Aesis, for the invitation.” He murmured.

She exhaled, “It sounds like Ina might not be the only one who could use some new memories.”

“I will try to help.” Sephiroth paused."Do you know what this means?"

"What?"

"The files in the Nibeheim mansion were curated. They made no mention of their termination contingency, yet they'd planned it since the end of the Wutai War. The information in those files was incomplete."

"Their full records should be in Midgar."

He nodded, pressed his lips together.

“Aesis, did you choose your own name?”

“Mm. I did. There is a myth of a goddess,” Aesis smiled sadly, “from Gaia-that-was. Her lover was murdered by his envious brother. The brother hacked him to pieces, and threw the parts of his fragmented body across the universe, across space and time, so that nothing could ever bring him back. The goddess, Isis, searched the heavens for all the remains of her beloved; she found all of his parts, and put him back together. She brought him back to life.”

“And of the three, the lover, the brother… the goddess, which are you?”

Aesis let out a laugh without humor. “All three, I imagine. You’re not the only traumatized child who wanted to be a god.”

“All this talk of war,” Sephiroth breathed. “But you named yourself after love.”

She caught her breath. “I named myself after a debt.”

“What you wished you could do for Mari?”

She nodded.

“Is that why you saved me?”

“To honor a debt, yes,” she finally answered, after a pause whose inarticulacy reminded him unexpectedly of his own. “And also because…” she closed her eyes, “You were alone from the beginning, and you survived, Sephiroth. How could I not… recognize that? Admire that?” She turned to face him. “The strength in you must put the Gods to shame.” He said nothing, and her voice grew softer when she asked, “Why did you save me?”  
  
“You protected me,” he replied. “It is… not something I’m accustomed to.”

“Is that it?” she appeared hurt. “A life for a life?”

“No. I… That is not what I meant. I don’t… know how to say what I meant.” Her arms were crossed over her chest, the thick viscose of her kimono obfuscated the sight of her breath until an emphasized inhale swelled against the fabric; he watched with unconcealed longing.

“From the beginning, you forced me to reckon with who I want to be,” Aesis said as his eyes climbed to her own, her skin warm under the brush of his gaze. “When I found you in the Orphanage I had a choice. One option would have made me feel monstrous, the other human. I chose the latter. Now… You listen to me. You can _understand_ what I’ve lived, yet you discover me so intimately, as a human being, as separate from yourself. I feel close to you,” She felt a surge of heartache and shook her head to dispel it. “Even with this misunderstanding, you... you took responsibility. I still feel safe with you. I’m not used to this.”

“Hm,” a half smile crossed his lips, “I thought you were a wondrous,” he said finally, “and I saved you because I couldn’t take from you and then leave you to die. I could not be someone… so… violently entitled. ” Sephiroth closed his eyes; the halting of his throat, the tensing of his mind, all signaled to him that what he said next should not be spoken. He arm crossed his chest and he spoke anyway: “What happened on that beach is… it has been on my mind.” Aesis looked away; she herself seemed to be gathering her resolve. He saw her hand go to her chest, to the bare skin where her materia might have been; he remembered the taste of her sternum, of her breasts, bare and wet with the Wutian sea. Her breath shook, and Sephiroth realized how hard the conversation was for her as well; when she finally looked at him, she did it with stiffened poise.  
  
“Let’s…” Aesis nodded. “Let’s talk about it.”

“I… I remember…. I wanted…” He closed his eyes. “I thought _you_ wanted…” it came out as gravel, his narrowing eyes darting away, “It left me confused. What… _did_ you want of me?”

“I wanted… Hm. Um. I felt, and _feel_ …” Aesis swallowed. The words would be halted, loosened by bourbon but still awkward on her tongue, there was no way around it. “… a deep attraction to you, Sephiroth.” She stopped as her words struck his stomach. _Oh fuck._ “A deep connection,” she continued. “But what happened on that beach was wrong… It left me ashamed,” She looked away. “In Shinra, we both learned that love and murder are… different sides of that same coin. From what you’ve told me, I think Jenova was similar.” He swallowed, nodded. “We’ve both fought for something better than that. I asked you to stop because being with you that way would have corrupted… _us_ … it would have left us grasping at delusion for solace. I don’t want to corrupt this. I—” Her breath caught, she felt her own tears press to the surface. Sephiroth realized she was about to cry.

“I’m glad,” he said softly. “What I remember of that fight was… desperation,” his jaw clenched. “I was undone in loss. Grief, _shame_ … the only thing that could still my fury was defeat and I fought in blind search of it. Mindless violence seeking obliteration; it felt as if I was obliterated in you, alive in you, and destroying you in turn. That _is_ so like what I knew with Shinra, with Genesis, so much so with Jenova… it would have been an endless enactment of… of the torture. Of the abandonment,” he realized. “I would have reached for you the way I reached for her, fought to collapse any boundary between us, any notion of where I ended and where you began. It would have been endless cycle of breaking, of being broken.”

“There was a time when that was the only intimacy I knew,” she whispered.

“Myself as well,” he said quietly. “With Genesis… we were saturated in it, each raised in it. I used to… imagine something else, a beautiful and impossible dream. The same, with Jenova. I imagined a mother.” He frowned. “A mother who would know me, who would learn my mind and help me understand hers, who would recognize my suffering and soothe it. But there was no room for anything of _me_. No room at Shinra for anything of _me._ To all of them, I existed only to be used.”

Sephiroth frowned at his eggnog.

“They left me unable to tolerate any awareness of myself. I was so empty, hidden almost entirely, from myself. When you found me in the past you ripped me open, brought such fire to the fore of me; the torture, the loneliness, everything I worked so hard to suppress. _Needed_ to suppress. I could not have endured that awareness of myself then.”

Aesis nodded. “And now?”

Sephiroth closed his eyes. “Self-awareness, that is what I fought Jenova to claim. I fought to take back the structure of my mind, to reject hers. I knew that I had to endure that separation, to discern where she ended and I began. Separating myself from Jenova felt like certain death, but… I stepped into it by sheer force of will. It was the only way to overcome her domination,” Aesis glimpsed his incredible strength, incredible determination, as it flashed in his eyes and felt an admiration that brought light to her own. “Then I aimed only to win,” Sephiroth continued. “ _Now_ it is… so different. This wholeness, this softness… This is what I _dreamt of_ , all my life. I feel that with you.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I do not… ever want… to feel what I felt then. Confused. Engulfed in another. _Broken._ ”

“No,” she whispered. “I… I want to be with you, Sephiroth.” Aesis closed her eyes, and felt the deafening terror, the vulnerability coiling in anticipation of rejection, ricochet through her bones. When the intensity passed, she added: “I don’t want that either. I would not offer you anything of my… heart… if I felt it would be engulfed and consumed, if I felt either of us would corrupt it.”

“What I want is the opposite,” Sephiroth said sincerely. “I want…” His head was spinning, suddenly; overwhelmed, he diverted to more familiar ground, where what he wanted was easier to articilate, easier to receive. He put his drink on a nearby cabinet and hastily, the ex-General dropped to one knee. Aesis’ jaw dropped.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“You asked me once to choose my path, let me do so now. I want _justice_. I should have fought Shinra, all along. I must fight them now,” he swallowed. “You do not takes orders; I know they go against your nature. I am _still_ a soldier.” Mouth agape, Aesis blinked as she finally pieced together what was happening. Sephiroth was regrouping, preparing. “On the field… your fight is my own, and you are already leading it. On the field, and only on the field, I ask you for the relief of hierarchy. I pledge you my sword, I pledge you my fealty. I will fight for you, Aesis. With you and for you.”  
  
Aesis felt her breath leave her lungs, her eyes piercing him, scrutinizing. The nauseated feeling she dreaded did not come; their past seemed all around them, but she did not feel sucked into it. Though it pained her, Aesis offered him her hand, a tradition in the prostrations of military allegiance. Following Shinra’s customs, he was meant to kiss her knuckle, but didn’t. Instead, his fingers curled around hers, he pulled her hand closer, as close to his heart as the distance between them would allow.

“And off the battlefield, soldier?” She whispered. “What do you want?”

“I want…” he looked at her; language was impossible and he despised it..

Tears gathered on her eyeline; she was pulling him up. “Come here.”

Sephiroth rose slowly; his hand moved to the base of her skull as he stood, aware suddenly of his height, of his size. His thumb stroked the soft skin of her cheek, tilted her head to his own. “ _You,”_ he hissed. “Will you kiss me again?” Aesis moved toward him, their lips grazed, slowly, tentatively. He heard her breath catch, stifling a moan, felt her body tremble for an instant, her fingers weaved through his hair. His thumb moved to wipe a tear from her eyes. At his touch, she pulled back, but her grip on his neck tightened. Aesis’ heavy eyes tensed, deepened with something inscrutable, hardened in cutting heat. She jerked her chin in a small, abrupt nod and moved. It took Sephiroth a moment to realize that her gesture did not indicate rejection, but release: she was moving toward him. Longing cracked her open as she closed the distance, he came hungrily to her. Her lips parted for him; his tongue pressed against her moan as she tasted his kiss again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Up next: The gang celebrate the holidays in ways both wholesome and not.
> 
> Thank you for reading!


	19. Interlude: Happy Krampnach

If you're reading this little story, I want to say thank you! This year has not been easy for anyone, and this has been a fun return to fanfiction after many years, in a game I love to escape to. It's also been a way of creating stories and characters out of the tragedies from this year, and creating healing and mercy that have not always been available in real life. For everyone who's read, left kudos, feedback, and bookmarked, thank you for bringing me light this year. 

Please accept this rendering of this problematic gang, including Queen Tifa, Sephiroth in a man bun and turtleneck, and Santa Vincent. Everyone's pretty out of character here, but I left Vincent true to form because he's obviously being held against his will. 

Happy ~~Krampnach~~ Holidays!


	20. Nibelheim Files: Abzu ex machina part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CW: explicit sexual content
> 
> ^that’s it. No plot. This is just meant to be mostly joyful, soft and smutty.
> 
> Formatting’s a bit wonky! I’m posting from my phone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There’s some role playing in this. One of my hcs for Sephiroth is that with his intelligence, and with the impossibly disconnected circumstances he would have grown up in, he could have developed a very rich fantasy life to ease the loneliness and create a sense of loving and being loved. I’ve written that into his love for Genesis, his struggle to differentiate what he hoped for with the realistic potential of that relationship, and in a brief flashback early on, described how the Jenova he imagined helped soothe him as a child. That’s developed more here, to explore the enemies-to-lovers trope that I think is sexy as hell but find is way too problematic for the relationship I want to create for him. There’s some character growth for my girl as well, who is being confronted, for the first time, with an experience she might want more than war.
> 
> As far as music, you can find the soundtrack here. The songs for this chapter are Sitting on the Moon by Enigma, No Plan by Hozier and Fool for You by Alice Smith.

She sat a foot in front of him, he saw her hair free, her bare back facing him. She was bathed in the soft glow of sunrise; she looked off at the window, dawn tracing curves of her body to settle in the soft crease where her thigh reached her hip. He had the impression that they were laying in another time. The room fell away in his mind; he felt his own hair brush the side of his face, as if lifted on a Wutian breeze. He had just been appointed General; now, he was walking the outskirts of Shinra’s encampment, ostensibly for surveillance. He wanted to see the sunrise, he supposed, warm comfort over shuddering trees. He wanted to watch birds fly. He might have needed some breath of solitude to reckon with her image; eyes like his own, glowing, savage passion ruthlessly invading his poised withdrawal the same way her fight ruthlessly closed his range. Where he had regularly returned from victory on Wutian battlefields with a mask of blood-soaked hair, cold and matted to hide his desolate eyes, when he survived her, he returned cracked apart, blood boiling. Exposed. Alive. 

No, he could not have endured it then. But he could pretend. 

He reached for life in the glow of a wartime dawn. 

“General,” Aesis murmured, as if possessed by the same dream. 

Sephiroth sat up behind her, overtaken by the fantasy; it felt almost as real as a memory, it was as if he were a general again. It was the same way he’d fantasized as a child, the worlds he’d built in his mind, first to endure, to fabricate within himself a mother whose abandonment in reality could be offset by the soothing her simulacrum offered him. Later, that dream became a lover who would cherish him, not hold him in possession and contempt. Now, he stepped into a world of his own making again; this time, he truly was not alone. His hand moved for her stomach, the other for her throat, he pulled her to him. She gasped, he felt the soft, gripping heat within her that poured languorous across every raw nerve, that captured his every sense, wet on his skin as she settled in his lap. His fingers traced the curve of her exposed neck and her head fell back onto his chest, her eyes were closed. She was in the sensation completely. He stroked the corner of her mouth and watched her lips part in reply. 

“Commander,” he murmured, a thick voice, her title in the Wutian resistance hot on his tongue. “You’ve taken a great risk to come to me.” 

“Mmhmm,” Aesis purred; the joy in her smile brought warmth to his chest as he saw she enjoyed it. She was his rival now, his allegiant’s most prolific traitor, a commander of Wutian resistance gridlocked against him on the fields of war. She was a rebel leader, hidden behind her sworn enemy’s lines to take their general as her lover. The love that would have broken them then could now be made playful, could be made joyful, acted out in their bed. Sephiroth brushed an aberrant strand of hair from her eyes, his fingertip tracing the delicate skin along her eyelids, the abandoned paths where tears had run so freely when he first filled her; when she clung to him, shaking, inside her he felt a mess of gasping surrender and gripping dominion; the rhythm of their hips turned pain to exquisite pleasure. It was animal. It was wondrous. Again and again.

Time collapsed on itself and they let themselves be swept with it. 

“There’s war all around us, isn’t there?” she asked. Aesis thought perhaps she was speaking in metaphor, trying to untangle the ubiquity of the past from the night they’d spent together. She imagined what it would have been like, if she met him then; extrapolating those moments wrapped around his hips in Shinra’s Com Sim, unleashed against his ghost in a past time, to her own battlefield. It would have rocked her to her core, facing him. Could she have stayed away? “I want to… I don’t want to see it here. But I am so afraid that if I look away, I’ll miss…” 

“…an execution,” he finished her sentence. 

“Yes. I want to rest my eyes,” she confessed, to herself as much as him. A tear fell onto her cheek, he wiped it aside. “Always trying to see, through convolutions of time and terror, relentlessly. I want to rest my eyes.” She didn’t want to stay away. She wanted to let go. More tears fell; his thumb overwhelmed, Sephiroth bent down to kiss the wet heat on her cheek. 

“I wish I could offer you absolute safety,” he traced the arch of her neck and fell out of the fantasy. “But I know I will become…cold like that again. I will try to be more communicative, but I— That is in me. Paranoia and… stonewalling. It’s… a problem." 

“—How do you want me to react ? Let you get away with it?” She asked. 

“No,” he replied immediately, thinking of the carte blanche Shinra had afforded him. “I don’t want you to let me get away with anything.” 

She smiled. 

“I don’t think you fear conflict, Commander,” he observed. Aesis murmured her agreement, and Sephiroth watched her, sensing fear in her of something far more violent than his tendency toward irrational and erratic withdrawal. Something atavistic, something still in her, he thought, sensing her body tense against his arms. 

“Do you fear losing your mind?” 

Aesis swallowed, she whispered that she did. 

His eyes tensed, movement in the order of milliseconds. “Do you really?” 

“Not seriously,” she pulled his arm closer. “Always, in my bones, I feel that fear, but now it’s… what I’m really feeling is this pull toward…” Aesis shook her head. “How could I have fought a war against you? I don’t know if I’d even… want war. I’ve been fighting for so long, I don’t… I don’t know what that means, not to want war.” Sephiroth blinked once, and asked what she’d have wanted instead. “This,” Aesis replied without hesitation. “The safety I feel here, it’s more than I think you know.” 

“Safety…” He retreated to their fantasy to find language for it, “from the annihilations of this war, that I can promise you,” he spoke in metaphor. “I promise you, Aesis.” He closed his eyes, falling to her scent; sex in ocean salt, spice, shiso like cool moss lit up in a forest dawn, he imagined rose petals blended in that earthen musk. “I want to give you a safe place to rest.” 

He felt hot, soft pressure again his hand and realized she’d pulled it to her beast, under her heart. Aesis watched him. 

“You confound me,” she said softly. “You appeal to the comforts of hierarchy, but you watch the birds as if the only thing you want is freedom.”

“In this moment,” he whispered, “I am free.” 

She kissed the soft skin inside his wrist and turned, the softness of her thighs gripping the hard contours of his muscle. He felt his name as she whispered it against his neck. “I don’t want to fight you,” Aesis realized, looking at him with a trace of fear that he felt in his bones. He hissed a _command,_ hurried and breathless, that she take him. She did, crying out, her body trembling. She was swollen, stretching, heat running through her as blood rushed in her hips; she could accommodate his size only with the most exquisite sensitivity.

“I would have left,” he gasped against her breast as they moved. “I would have left Shinra.” 

After, they lay tangled in each other, tangled in strewn sheets of linen gauze. Aesis kept her head on Sephiroth’s chest, listening to the steady, near preternaturally slow beat of his heart. In the swells and crests of the night’s passion, she’d slipped beneath his armor, the cauterized aloofness he’d forged to his skin over years of neglect and war. She’d felt it first when he paused, whispered I don’t know what to do. You are the most intuitive warrior I’ve ever seen. Your body will know, and when he finally let go, moved into his body completely, she felt like she was both his prey and his god. The juxtaposition of exaltation and surrender pushed her to the edge; he turned her over and took her with the rageful hunger of a predator, with the sublime lust of a wounded lover. His voracious arms clung to her, holding her to him violent pressure, warrior’s hands rough and rapacious on her breasts, his full weight holding her legs apart, holding her open to the point of pain. I’ll hurt you, he worried. 

You won’t. Don’t hold back. 

Don’t hold back. 

He didn’t. He was ferocious, taking the touch long denied him, claiming contact that would translate his hunger into his lover’s body in the same savage acuity with which he felt it. 

Are you alright? It took him time, when he saw her tears, to realize he had not hurt her. He’d opened her in every way. He brought her crying, shaking in swelling sensitivity to the exquisite edge of the pain and pleasure she craved, again and again; each time, pleasure won. He accepted the gratitude that flowed from her with a tenderness that took up more of him as the night went on, a tenderness that brushed her skin in soft kiss, soft taste. The wonder in his eyes as she let her body move with abandon around him, through its own sacred rhythms, made every cell in her beam with a feeling of her own divinity. Thank you. 

She had not smiled so much in so long. 

They stayed awake. Their bodies where too accustomed to solitude to sleep pressed against another, so they closed their eyes and breathed, wrapped around each other. Now he watched her with quiet wonder, with a soft vulnerability that made Aesis wonder how foreign love was to him. 

“Have you done that before?” she asked. 

Sephiroth shook his head. “Never,” he confessed quietly, his face tensing. She smiled, spontaneous and gentle, warm joy lifting to her eyes. “Mm,” Aesis pressed the back of her hand over her mouth. “Then you missed your calling.” 

Sephiroth smiled, his eyes alight. 

“Then if we renounce war, I’ll have an alternative career.” 

“Ha! Mm,” she reached up, tracing a gentle shape against his cheek. His happiness, the slight twist of his smile and softness of his eyes, lifted her. “It’s beautiful to see you happy.” Sephiroth’s smile deepened. “I am happy.” 

They stayed in that happiness for a few more moments. Their joy was like the light of dawn during war, an interlude of warm light and dew on a battlefield. For all its happiness, the relief would inevitably illuminate the scars left on the battlefield’s soil, the blood still staining its grass. It took longer than it might have.

“Thank you,” Sephiroth whispered his gratitude to her.

She murmured her reply and stopped the phrase short when a faraway sadness, a sudden shadow, snatched his gaze. Her last word came out “What’s wrong?” and Sephiroth shook his head. His arm wrapped around her, relaxing when his hand found her shoulder. He took a moment to sort it out. 

“Why have you forgiven me?” He asked at last. 

He listed his crimes, haltingly at first and then with a steady rhythm, with shame-filled self-flagellation, and when she heard them summed up that way she thought it was no wonder. It was the first time he’d said Aerith’s name aloud, and his voice broke at the mention of Cloud. For a split second, Sephiroth remembered, he had caught a glimpse of Cloud’s helmet during his stilted return to Nibelheim. That alone had been enough to overwhelm him, and he’d run. Sephiroth tried to understand where the sudden well of shame had sprung from, and couldn’t; it was enough, perhaps, that throughout the course of his night he had watched the physicality of his most primal instinct give rise to joy, not to death. Every feeling that existed seemed to have passed through him that night, and gave rise to love, not to hatred. It cracked him open, in the imperceptibly subtle way cracks formed in him before whole dams broke and rivers flooded. 

He did not want to flood. 

His reverie gave her a moment to think. “Does guilt often follow happiness for you?” 

“I’ve not had enough happiness to know.” 

Aesis pressed her lips together, “And compassion?” 

That reminder melted him. His posture stiffened to contain a sob, and at the same time his grip tightened; his conflict was written in his body. She kissed his chest, soft lips, lips still swollen from the force his own, pressed over his beating heart. “I feel… sadness,” he murmured finally, unsure of how else he could hold himself together but to speak. “And I am sorry. I feel sorry. I don’t… What I have done is unresolved, still. I must… I don’t think I deserve happiness.” 

“I think you do.” 

“Hm,” Sephiroth muttered, looking away. It wasn’t an argument. 

“Alright, then.” She pulled him in her arms, brushing aside silver bangs to kiss his forehead. It hurt her heart, to see the storm reach for him once more. She suspected that any effort to compare her crimes to his would, in that moment, be a false equivalency; any effort to absolve him of accountability would feel as corrupt and hollow as Shinra’s absolution. It was the first time Sephiroth knew enough about himself to take accountability for the things he had done, and on this first run out the gate, the magnitude of the reckoning he faced was tremendous. 

“I’ll stay with you in it,” She offered, squeezing his shoulder. “A soft place to rest.” 

His grip on her firmed and he turned back to look; the faintest touch of confusion, then gratitude, pierced the stoic sadness in his eyes. His powerful, nimble fingers wrapped around her cheek as he pressed her forehead to his; Sephiroth held her warmth close and closed his eyes. Her arms tightened around him, soft, strong. 

“Thank you.” 

He would not have to face the storm alone.

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed it! I hoped to write the whole holiday, in time for the holidays, but I’ve run out of everything I’d written and plot I’d developed before posting this story, so things will take longer now. I like having time to work with the psychology of these characters creatively, and from the feedback I’ve gotten it seems folks reading this like that part of this story too. That takes time. 
> 
> I’ll be updating every other week from now on, so I can have that time and can keep this fun. I hope you’re all having a peaceful end to this year, and hope you’ll stop by in 2021. Thank you for reading!


	21. Nibelheim Files: Abzu ex machina pt. 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sephiroth remembers his night with Aesis and grapples with the bounds of safety.  
> Madam M intercepts a call that gives insight into Corneo’s strategy.
> 
> CW: sexually explicit content, involves characters thinking about past abuse, including sexual abuse. Also involves themes honestly ripped straight from the news of fascism, narcissistic abuse, and how specific strategies of communication and manipulation might facilitate the chaos in which fascistic authoritarianism can rise. I’ve tried to make it still feel true to the game, and to Corneo’s character, so hopefully it won’t just read like a retelling of news you might want to escape, but... maybe it works maybe it doesn’t. you’ll see what I mean.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize this isn’t longer, I’ve written more but am struggling to access the file (long, boring story from technology hell) so I reordered this chapter to include what I could. 
> 
> The song in-text is Hejira, by Joni Mitchell. Another song I’d recommend is Loving the Alien by David Bowie, because Sephiroth is... ya know. Finally, Mea Culpa by Enigma captures the obsession and possession that Ae and Seph explore in fantasy and in roleplay.

Aesis lay next to him, turned on her side; she could feel his finger, tucked just under the crease of her thigh. He slept that way, stretched out on his back, only the slightest touch between them. Barely breathing, subtle evidence of his elite conditioning, the slow rise and fall of his chest rolled like a metronome in the harsher light of the noonday sun. She watched. He was a feast; her skin hummed with satiation, yet the hard cut of his stomach, his soft, disarmingly tender expression, made her feel hungry. She smiled. 

The Nibeli night had become the Wutian dawn. The dawn had become a treasonous morning, joy betrayed by shame, a shame whose steady clutch on him seemed eventually to release into acceptance. It did take time, and like the tide, it’s depths and currents pulled away back to reveal land, to spark something softer, something that elevated sadness to exquisite beauty. Half a day of sex and fantasy later, they finally slept. She woke first and shifted her weight to watch him, feeling the silk of her curls spill out on her chest, on skin raw with love and swollen in a smiling celebration of her own sensuality, a sense he’d left embodied in her. His touch, his reverence, his desire. She felt like a goddess. She wanted to reach out and touch him, but let her hand settle on the slope of her own thigh. The effort to let him rest was swiftly dashed: as soon as he felt the brush her eyes, Sephiroth opened his own. Aesis bit her lip, watching his tensed, serpentine pupils fix on her through their emerald frame. His lip curled into a gentle smile, bringing some expression, a coy relief, to break through the haze of waking. “You’re here.” 

She moved with him as he pulled her closer, his hand finding its way around her; his fingers could have strayed, she noticed, could have moved to her shoulder. They didn’t. He pulled her hips to his own, leaned to taste her lips as she moaned. His smile deepened against her mouth, she heard a smug chuckle, and Sephiroth bit playfully at her lower lip, deepening her pleasure. Aesis laughed into the apparent challenge, the shine in her eyes sharpened; she leaned in. The contest that developed was a messy nod to competition, their efforts to conquer were dissolved quickly into laughter, into her lips on his neck, into his hands… _Mm,_ she closed her eyes. _Everywhere_. 

“Good morning.”

He held her, watching with the quiet reserve he found comfortable; laugher left Sephiroth’s head spinning. He wasn’t used to any of it, to the intimacy of touch, to spontaneous laughter, the way joy opened spaces within him that felt collapsed, long anesthetized. Each smile that lifted into his eyes seemed to almost immediately sharpen some new pain; joy left him unable to hide from himself. Now a cool current of sadness accompanied his happiness, as if he could only grieve what he’d been so long deprived of when he finally found it. He felt a pit open up in his stomach, _fear, self-loathing, again,_ as abrupt as a smack in the face. Sephiroth’s expression darkened, a shadow passed over his eyes. _It was a relief, that sudden sense of loathing,_ though he didn’t want it to be. It was familiar, far more familiar than the feeling of her skin pressed against his own, than their breath matched in aberrant rhythm, than the heat of her strong thighs around him. _Far more familiar than the heat of her—_

He shook his head. 

He'd not started that night joyfully, far from it. He’d not known what to do. It wasn’t something he’d ever felt particularly comfortable with, on those occasions he felt anything at all. Growing up, he encountered it quite young; part of being a child soldier was a formative exposure to grotesque and explicit sexuality. Pornography before algebra. Rape, usually unspoken and unpunished, permeated an atmosphere of supposed integrity; in the context of war, he understood rape before he understood love. In all of that, he’d felt a pervasive deadness, an emotional aversion more informed by the confusion violence he hadn’t trained for left in him. _Perhaps,_ Sephiroth realized, _his aversion was also informed by the violation of Hojo’s invasive experimentation, the memories sealed in his body out of context, out of time._ _How was he meant to untangle that mess_? He’d felt nothing, a deadened disinterest that only served to make him more ostracized, more unlike the others. That deadness changed with Genesis. Genesis’ smirking eyes, the way he moved his hair, the flamboyant curve of his wrist… his slightest gesture seemed erotic. The cut of muscle tracing his hips, slipping beneath towels when they showered, beneath the loose covering of his unbuckled pants when they changed. _Disappearing into…_ He tried to avert his gaze, but the numbness melted, carrying with it glimpses of a desire that repulsed and excited him. He wanted to taste him, _there._ Explore him, _there._ He avoided that desire at much as possible... _And Cloud?_ Sephiroth remembered how it felt when he reached for Cloud’s shoulder, for his wrist. _I am your everything._ He closed his eyes and shook Cloud from his thoughts. 

The contours of Aesis’ body, by contrast to Genesis’, felt more foreign to him; he has no idea how to touch her as more than a caricature of herself. His mind was seized by a memory of a fellow SOLDIER third, Rafe, maybe eighteen when Sephiroth was eleven. It was not Rafe so much, but his videos, specifically, illicit uploads he kept encrypted on his PHS. One day, Rafe made Sephiroth watch them, as if he was doing him some sort of favor. Raphe explained in demeaning detail the features of the women in his films, the specifics of what was happening to them. Confused, Sephiroth wondered why those women tried to smile so much when it mostly looked like they hurt. Rafe dismissed him. _Trust me, they’re into it._ Sephiroth looked at Aesis’ body, her strong legs, her breasts inviting, taunt muscle sloping into soft curves. He let his fingers wander, tracing the pronounced edge of her hip, moving lower. All he could imagine was Rafe’s video, and there was no doubt in his mind that even if he could faithfully duplicate that mechanical fondling, Aesis would not appreciate it.

_I don’t know what to do._

The only way he’d known such intimate proximity with another was in fighting; usually, it was with the people he killed.

He imagined the beach. Pulling her, his rival, out of the sea and moving, as if in a trance, to claim her with his mouth. No inhibition. No plan. Gods, he wanted to feel that free again. _What if…_ the fantasy sparked in his mind, and he let it flow. _What if she had fought him then? Not in a single battle, dodging the convolutions of time, but the whole war?_ He imagined Aesis in his quarters, her war surrendered in her longing for him, letting her robe fall, the way actors in wartime epics did when they offered themselves. _She’d walk closer_ , he imagined. _Wordlessly,_ because in his fantasy they didn’t need words, and it was easier that way. _It was almost real._ His breath turned animal as he watched her exposed body, surrendered to him, dominating him. His enemy, his love among the same people he’d learned to hate, she wanted him; _after he fought her_ , he knew, _she’d have been his obsession_ . The deadness within him would have exploded, burned out of control. Nights, pacing, training, futile. His hands moved along her thighs and opened her. In that protective mess of what-ifs and the half-real, he felt fire in his veins, burning to his core. _She drove an indefatigable heat in him._ Her taste, forbidden and _his,_ succulent and wet on the length of his tongue, the sweet sound of her cries, of _his name,_ shuddering with each sampling. Sephiroth felt release. Rage, dominion, longing all welled inside him with unbearable pressure, unbearable pain. Inside her, he was sure they would dissolve, washed away in an obliterating pleasure that he needed _now_ . Aesis whispered that his body would know how to move. _His full strength, if he let himself go, let his body move with the violence beaten into it..._ He remembered himself.

_I’ll hurt you._

_You won’t._ She wanted it. She knew his strength. She knew something of his violence.

_Don’t hold back._ She said it twice, close to begging, trembling. Not even death would bring that timbre of desperation to this woman’s voice. Not even torture could make Aesis beg. _Yet for him..._

His eyes flashed, and Sephiroth let go. He growled, _On your knees, Rebel._ She gasped; he couldn’t wait. He turned her over, pushed her on all fours. Her legs splayed out wide at his direction; in the haze of anticipation, in the sight so beautifully exposed to him, he missed her foot, pulling him down against her. _You too, General._ Sephiroth wrapped an arm around her chest as he caught himself. His arm screamed, she pressed him against her lips, pressed the wet heat of her tongue against his raw skin, pressed teeth. _My general. I want you. Now._ She made a sound like an impatient whine and Sephiroth pinned her legs apart beneath his weight, spreading her around his contours. _I am undone in you, Wutian._ He heard her cry out as abruptly, he opened her to his size, leaving her shaking, spilling her tears; _he was hurting her_ . He felt her stretching, her body contracting in a wanton, seizing dance around him, moving in futile effort to escape the pain. He held her still. He felt her strength, hot silk, wet liquor, gripping, _gripping onto him_ as she adjusted, opened to take him deeper; unbearable pleasure mixed with the mess in his mind and poured molten across his every raw nerve. Sephiroth shifted his weight, moving with the intention of deepening her pain. _I want you to feel what you’ve done to me, my Wutian. My rebel._ With all the strength in him, his hips hit with violent adulation, whispering against her tears _my Goddess_ . She held on; they clung to each other that way. He couldn’t tell from her expression if she felt pleasure or agony, but her body took both, shaking, tensing in his unrelenting grip, her body took release on the waves of brutal rhythms. He felt a mounting tension deep within her, heard her cry sound from that place, from an exquisite tightness building deep around _him_. She took him with her.

Sephiroth felt tears in his eyes. The pleasure was more than anything he could have imagined. The sex was indescribable. _But had he hurt her? Was she afraid of him? Was he afraid of himself?_ It was hard to think clearly, his noxious self-loathing only intensified. _Dear Gods, had he made her feel what—_

“Sephiroth?” Aesis was pressed against his chest. She’d been watching him, her brow furrowed. “Are you alright?”

“Did I… Earlier, when I… I know what Shinra did to you, was that… Did I hurt you? Did I frighten you?”

A shadow crossed her eyes as clouds obfuscated the sunlight around them. “Oh,” Aesis pushed away, pulling the linen gauze around her chest, covering herself. It has been so far from her mind, it landed explosively, in confusion. “It is very unlikely that if you had,” she stumbled, “that I’d have sex with you for half a day afterward, that I’d be happy right now.”

“I… I understand, I just… You asked me not to hold back, but I worried that it… that I…” he lost his words, or at least his willingness to articulate them. She guessed that he worried she’d felt victimized by him, that the roughness she asked for had acted out something she’s survived in the orphanage. “Hm,” his tone was muted in response. Aesis resented his bringing it up but behind his awkward and abrupt expression, she could see the concern in his eyes. “There’s a line I never want to cross,” he gathered his thoughts. “I… Did I?”

“No.” He looked skeptical. “It’s never gone,” she explained quietly, willing patience. She wanted those memories as far away as possible, but it mattered to her that his intention in addressing it be to discern her boundaries, not to sneak through them. “What we did felt safe. I do like pain, sometimes. I like… I liked what you did.” _That was an understatement_ . “That’s not me acting out victimization, I don’t feel helpless or small or… truly threatened, not at all. In safety, pain is something I allow myself to enjoy. Those memories are never gone, but they…” Aesis frowned, trying to find a word that could capture the feeling, “ _they_ got smaller, with time. They used to define me, drown me. I used to live in their shadow. Now, it’s still there, and,” she looked at him pointedly, “it does _hurt_ to talk about.” Sephiroth pressed his lips together. “I didn’t want you to hold back. _I_ wanted to feel what you made me feel. lf it felt like it did then, I would have stopped you. Immediately.” 

“I thought… It seemed, when you told me not to hold back, that… it looked like you were afraid.”

“Hm,” Aesis looked away. “Well maybe. Sex will always be complicated for me, maybe I was afraid. It’s possible to feel afraid, and be safe, at the same time, and that is… I enjoy that. I… It’s important to me that you… please don’t try to anticipate what I need. Not with that. Don’t read my mind, please don’t try to protect me. I protect me. I decide if I’m okay.”

“You’re asking me not to read _your_ mind?” His eyes narrowed. “You read people so ruthlessly, Aesis, is that not hypocritical?”

“Huh,” she chuckled. “When I do that with someone’s deepest pain, it’s inevitably a battle, and it’s that way for a reason. It’s invasive. It’s not boundaried. Even if you perceive more than what I say, what’s in my mind is my own. Just… if you can trust me, just ask me.”

“I did,” Sephiroth‘s eyes narrowed, he seemed unsure of what was wrong. “That’s precisely what I did.” ” “I— you’re right,” Aesis breathed. “You’re right, I…” she closed her eyes. _He was trying to ask her._ She was getting overwhelmed. She didn’t want to think about it, and she hadn’t been prepared to talk about it. _Was she thinking clearly?_

Aesis groaned and let her face fall against his shoulder. 

“Time out, please,” she mumbled against his skin. Sephiroth’s lip curled in a slight smile, he felt a tension in his chest release. _Time out._ “This is… It helps if you give me a warning, or… an opt-out... before you ask me about something like this. My head’s spinning.” 

”Oh,” he quickly replied. ”Of course. I will.” His brow furrowed slightly, he thought a moment. She watched him, bracing, but he listened so earnestly. She still wasn’t used to it. “Could I ask you one more question?” He said finally, gently. When she exhaled, tucking herself into his arm, and said it depended on what he wanted to know, he breathed and continued, “How do you want me to… how do I know what’s… going to hurt?”

“Ask if it’s okay,” She replied firmly, sitting up slightly to face him. “Ask if it’s okay. It’s always changing. It can be the most subtle thing that triggers it... the color of a wall, a specific, fucking… frequency of ambient noise, and then for an instant it’s... everywhere. I can’t always predict it.”

“A flashback.”

“Mm,” Aesis smiled with a bitter tinge. The notion of a flashback was the best word they had, but it did little to capture the way she’d lived preserved in the emotions of Shinra’s abuse. The emotions of a child who survived that hell. The murderous rage, the weight of constant anxiety, terror like a cold shot at the slightest provocation, the dread of death, dread of life, the grief that seized her from the moment she opened her eyes. It left her confused in the present, not fully aware her body was trapped in the past. She’d been sealed in that trauma like a woman frozen in ice. The word _flashback_ barely did it justice, for years. Years. _Decades_ . Then, in the struggle, in her body, _she realized it was over_ . In her body’s struggle, _she realized what was real._ Her body reclaimed itself, with it her mind, and the weight of Shinra’s crimes became smaller. “It doesn’t happen very often, not anymore,” she added. He heard her voice soften and reflexively reached for her, his thumb on her cheek. “If it does,” she continued, tone firmer. “I’ll tell you.”

Aesis saw the relief in his eyes. _He didn’t seem to want her small._

“I was confused, I think. I am still not used to people communicating… openly. What they need. What they feel. I… assumed that if it was wrong, you wouldn’t tell me. Of course you would,” he shook his head. “I apologize, Aesis, truly. I think I made you feel exactly as I wished to avoid.”

“Hm.”

She looked at him. It was the most simple thing: the words were awkward in his mouth, but they did not shield an uncaring or condescendingly intellectualized recitation of some script, they did not shield contempt. There was no grandiosity to his words, no rescue, no covert attempt to malign or to steal. For someone as invested in command structure as he was, he was so unlike Shinra. He listened. He changed what he did. _Again_ . She let the weight of her head fall against his hand. _A soft place to rest._

“Can I ask you a potentially complicated question?” She asked him, closing her eyes against the sun as it broke through the shadows, smiling into its warmth. 

“Mm,” he replied. _Her vengeance was swift_. “Maybe.”

“In all your rich imaginings, did you dream? Of the future?”

Sephiroth exhaled and looked away. “That is a complicated question,” she heard him whisper. “I should have done, shouldn’t I? People dream. But not soldiers. I think you know that.”

“We fight or we die,” she replied softly. 

“That’s what I used to think about,” he answered. “When others’ circumstances permitted them to imagine a future, when they were foolish enough to dream of being like me,” he scoffed, “or to dream of marriage, or… old age. I never imagined anything like that. I wondered who would defeat me, finally. I wondered how I’d die. I…” he remembered his fantasies of Genesis, moments frozen in an atelier without beginning or end. “I did let myself imagine love, toward the end. I always did let myself imagine… a mother. Those dreams burned in Nibelheim. But I… I did not… I did not imagine a tangible future. Now I try to, but it is so… it is still so difficult.”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t know. I _must_ fight Shinra. There is purpose for me there, a debt that I must… I _must…_ make some good of this.”

She touched his cheek.

“What about for today?” she asked. “What do you want for Krampnach?” “Hm,” Sephiroth smirked. “I don’t know. We’re meant to give gifts to the dead as well, no?” She nodded, her gaze not leaving him. Sephiroth cocked his head, eyes shining with his sharp, faraway edge. “What do you want, Aesis?”

A soft smile brushed her lips. He saw sadness trace it’s contours, but thought it better not to ask. 

_To fight or to die_ , she thought, _might not be enough anymore._

Aesis looked into his ocean eyes, to his captivating complexity, the interplay of his exquisite softness and his penetrating steel, and _Gods,_ she wanted _him_. Again. 

She smiled, cherishing, a little sly. 

“Coffee.”

—————

The keeper of the Nibelheim Inn has allowed them to decorate a back dining room, a small space with a modest kitchen and lit fireplace.

Aesis watched half-and-half swirling in her coffee; the colors blended in a vortex left by her spoon. Streaks of spice, the warm cloves and cinnamon of the season, disappeared into her drink and lifted their scent to soothe her. The vapor brushed her face, plumping the cushion of skincare she’d applied half a day too late. She breathed, feeling some measure of stillness. 

She wanted to cook for them, bake something. It was a bizarre impulse for her. Food was always a sensual joy, but it had been many years since cooking brought her any pleasure. _Gingerbread,_ she thought. _Ina might appreciate a chance to build a home._ She bought it from a local baker instead, fresh and fragrant, and wrapped with more care than she suspected the child would appreciate. Aesis straightened the bow, her finger lingering with care that she wished Ina would accept from her, but intuited she could not. Sephiroth had purchased a present for Ina as well, a stuffed moogle like the one he’d once been given in Shinra’s labs. A soft moment in a world of sharp edges, he’d remembered it. Aesis almost cried. _It was the only honest gift he could think to give a child_ , he explained. She kissed him then, in the store, in front of everyone.

Sephiroth.

She’d told him that sex was complicated for her, and it was, but _Gods_ , every second with him complicated her. It shouldn’t, _they were both warriors. Forged in it, committed to it._ Yet the more they played with it in the confines of safety, the more they found each other through it, the more the desolate horror of war itself seemed to fall away. It felt like she was losing the only ground she’d ever known, the only ground she’d ever trusted. _A soft place to land._ Aesis felt the relief of it in her chest, and wanted to move toward it. At the same time, she wanted desperately to pull away. 

She didn’t have much time to work through it; suddenly, there was a shuffle of wrapping paper, bags, and holiday miscellany into the room. 

It was Tifa. Then Vincent.

Then Sephiroth. 

He stopped a foot in front of her. She wanted to touch him, but found herself freezing up; she couldn’t tell if he felt the same, or if she was projecting, and finally settled on perhaps the most awkward expression she’d ever attempted. Aesis looked away, smiling to her shy eyes in a self-deprecating laugh. 

“Hi.” 

Sephiroth breath, amusement brightening his exhale. “Hi,” he whispered back. 

“News,” Madam M interrupted. 

Aesis cleared her throat. 

“Is Folia here?”

“Corneo tipped the _militia_ off.” Tifa sighed, looking between Aesis and Sephiroth. “And that’s a problem for us, but here’s the thing: they don’t know we’re the ones coming.”

“What?”

“The call I received described ‘armed, cracked-out hoodlums’ as the militia’s target. Corneo’s tipping them to target his own goons.”

Aesis breathed. She lifted her coffee to her nose, letting the smell shift her mindset. Back to war, back to cold, desolate hell and to negotiating the minds of those who created it.

“Corneo’s going to throw them under the bus.”

Sephiroth’s eyes narrowed dangerously; he nodded at her. “If Corneo sends his men to fight without getting his hands dirty, he’ll face no accountability. They’ll wipe each other out, canonize the militia. It will serve to legitimize Shinra’s presence in Nibelheim.”

“While making it look like his goons were acting alone. It absolves Shinra,” Tifa added.

Sephiroth looked at her, his eyes widening for a instant with surprise that she’d spoken to him. He nodded. 

“And all of that, while striking the fear of God in Nibelheim’s people.” Aesis clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “He thinks he can play family favorites with a _militia_. These people are delusional.”

“Ae,” Tifa scoffed. Aesis looked at her. “ _Family_ favorites? They’re his men… he’s putting their actual lives at risk. Do you really think he’s going to eat his own? How could anyone...”

Aesis and Sephiroth both caught their breath. Vincent was not long behind them. 

“You are so often the voice of goodness that cannot grow here, my friend,” Aesis smiled sadly. “Of course he’ll eat his own. This is what abusive people do to maintain power and control over groups. _All_ groups. He does it to the people he trafficks, and he’ll do it to his soldiers,” Aesis shook her head, she started pacing. “It’s called triangulation. He’s controlling communication, stoking chaos, trying to pit people against each other so he can come out on top.” Mari’s face moved through her mind. Aesis crossed her arms over her chest, her eyes flashing. “ _One lives, one dies._ ”

Sephiroth nodded, watching her with inscrutable eyes. 

“He hopes they’ll be so busy fighting each other, they won’t notice he's setting them both up. But it does tell us something. This Corneo likes to hide.” She turned, her movement like a crouching tiger smiling through the grass. “I see you, motherfucker.”

_This was not the same Aesis who explored the limits of violence in the safety of his bed. This was Aesis in true danger, where no safety was possible; the warrior in her still cracked him open._ Returning to war after the night they shared would be different, Sephiroth intuited. Yet it was a lie to say that an ancient part of him was not drawn to the fray. He wanted to fight alongside Aesis again. 

The slightest smile crossed his lips. 

Madam M glared. “Then what about _me_ ? How does he plan to get to _me?_ ”

Aesis frowned. “I don’t know.”

“Fantastic. So we don’t know the full play, there are a chaotic number of players in the board, and if he gets his way, he’ll cover this up _and_ assume fascistic control of _my_ town in the same gambit.”

Aesis‘ expression grew distant. She stood and walked to the fire, nodding to herself, as if running a thousand scenarios through her mind simultaneously. Her eyes searched the flames, conjuring a map of her new adversary's mind. “Corneo sounds childish,” she said finally. “Yeah,” Tifa replied. “Actually, yeah. He’s… tricky, slippery, he _always_ escapes. But he’s pretty pathetic in person. He had this laugh I’ve never forgotten, it was like… like a kid taunting you on a playground, or stealing candy, but he was talking about mass murder, about rape. It was chilling.” 

Aesis nodded. “He’s always gotten away with it?”

“Apparently,” Vincent huffed. “He’s not particularly _smart_ , but it seems he’s always been able to con, intimidate... he relies on the corruption of others to dodge accountability for his own crimes.”

“Idiot bitch baby,” Madam M sneered, throwing her fan on their table in disgust. 

Aesis held her hand over the fire, letting her fingers dance in the flames. There was some pain, but as ever, she didn’t burn. 

“He wants to step in the ring with warriors,” she observed quietly. “Let him try.”

While they decorated the Inn’s dining room, she sang a song called Exodus. Tifa played a small piano in tha back of the room, brooding chords like drums rolling on a desert storm. Moving, soothing in its melancholy, the song brought intimacy on a desolate chorus. Aesis swayed, slowly, as though possessed in Tifa’s music, as if returning to the easy intimacy she shared with her friend. She moved from her hips, Sephiroth noticed, arguing with disorderly wrapping paper stuck to the moogle’s leg. She sang from her hips. He scrambled to extract himself from the engulfing memory of how it felt to move there with her.

_I’m traveling in some vehicle,_ Aesis sang. _I’m sitting in some cafe ._

_A defector from the petty wars_

_That shell shock love away_

_In our possessive coupling_

_So much could not be expressed_

_Now I am returning to myself_  
_These things that you and I suppressed_

 _I'm porous with travel fever_  
_But you know I'm so glad to be on my own_  
_Still the slightest touch of a stranger_  
_Can set up trembling in my bones_  
_I know no one's going to show me everything_  
_We all come and go unknown_  
_Each so deep and superficial_  
_Between the forceps and the stone_

 _I'm traveling in some vehicle_  
_I'm sitting in some cafe_

_A defector from the petty wars_

_Until love sucks me back that way._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed it.
> 
> If you’re enjoying this and there’s anything you’d like to see more of, or have explored in more depth, I hope you’ll consider dropping a comment to let me know! I’m plotting out the rest of this chapter, and while there are some twists coming it’s still forming. I would love feedback if there’s anything you’d like to see.


	22. Nibelheim Files: Abzu ex machina pt 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The holidays come and go with a surprising revelation.
> 
> CW: sexy but not explicit content, all the usual warnings. Ina, a child OC who was trafficked by Corneo, shows up and her experience of trauma is explored in more depth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The music for this chapter, at least for me, is more maternal than anything else. “Je te souhaite” by Natasha St Pier is a song that I listen to when writing some of my hcs of Sephiroth and Lucrecia, but also Sephiroth and the mother he might have imagined Jenova to be. You can find an okay English translation here. The song essentially and poetically describes the things a woman too broken by life to realize herself as a person or mother wishes she could give to her child. “Loyal, Brave and True” by Christina Aguilera for my girl, as she tries to mother herself through falling in love, and understand who she’s becoming.
> 
> That is not going to be a smooth ride.
> 
> Also pretty sure a near verbatim reimagining of a scene from Hunchback of Norte Dame shows up here. Disney on the brain.

Barret watched the formation of Wutian troops from the pagoda’s observation deck. The sharp, rhythmic clap of boots hitting the floor in unison filled the air around him like the beat of a drum. A sea of uniforms turned to face him, ions yanked into the force of a magnetic field. His eyes narrowed. His mood could at best be described as resigned: he had not wanted this. He told her that. He never wanted a country’s agenda to weigh on his shoulders, never wanted an army. He never wanted that kind of power.

_The power._

He saw something flash in Aesis’ slit eyes that he’d never seen before, something that pained her and that he didn’t want to see again. “For years, Shinra has done nothing but confuse power with domination. That’s why you should have it,” she said firmly. “Your leadership will change what power means.” That was the end of it. Aesis walked away, and left Barret Wallace to become a General of the Wutian army. Wutian _resistance,_ he reframed immediately. He still ran a rebellion; he’d accepted on the condition that Wutai’s agenda would be his, not the other way around. That was that. When Midgar fell, or when they _thought_ Midgar fell, when Jenova’s corrosive signature vanished from the livestream and Aesis and Tifa set off for Nibelheim, he’d fully believed that the roughest patch his relationship with Aesis was over. He believed that. Until the unholy hour of 6:18 that morning, when his PHS rang and it was her, trying to handle him like he was as volatile as one of Shinra’s spewing bombs. Something happened, he knew immediately. Turned out, that something was Sephiroth. 

Barret didn’t believe it at first, thought something happened to his hearing. Then he lost it. Aesis’ own volatility gave her empathy for his, she was more reserved in the face of his outrage than most. Typically, he appreciated her mild aggravation at hishyperbole, he appreciated the confidence that weaved into her apologies when she owned her shit. But this was beyond— _He’s changed. He was brainwashed, Barret, he’s… deprogrammed._ Not good enough. _Talkembout deprogrammed! He is evil!_ She protested, but she listened. _He deserves to pay,_ Barret shouted at his palm. Aesis waited a beat and asked dully what punishment matched the magnitude of Sephiroth’s crimes. Barret was speechless. _He was mad,_ she continued, more emotion breaking through. _He was driven mad, he was abandoned, betrayed, forced to kill, medically tortured, exploited, tricked. Those directly responsible for his madness tried to execute him for it. What little identity he had was then ruthlessly ablated to subjugate his mind to a colonial destroyer pretending to be his mother. A master manipulator exploiting his longing for a mother._ She asked what punishment could be worse than what Sephiroth had already endured. She asked what justice could mean. More torture? Another death? _What are you suggesting?_ Barret finally asked. _Accountability in redemption,_ she replied. _He’s fought to reclaim himself. He defeated Jenova. Give him the chance to hold himself accountable._ He could hear the waiver of love in her voice, perhaps clearer than she could.

_I know what this must ask of you, Barret, I know I sound unsympathetic. I have apologized so many times, since I found him… it’s getting a bit thin. I am sorry for what this asks of you. He’ll fight for us._

_Us?_ Barret intuited, his voice a growl. _Or you?_

_For himself,_ she dodged. _You have two armies now._

Eventually, somehow, as she explained what happened in Nibelheim, while he sat, fighting the torrents of pain in that soft place within him whose existence gave rise to his outrage, Barret eventually turned lukewarm to the idea. There should have been precautions, he knew. A fucking phone call shouldn’t have been enough to recruit one of his greatest enemies to his army. Sephiroth should have been taken to Wutai, but at the end of the day, the person most able to vet him would have been an ex-SOLDIER as deeply psychological as Aesis anyway. Before he could finish that thought process Tifa was on the line. Explaining _it was true. He’s fighting for us. I don’t like it, but he really has changed._ Then Vincent, waxing endless about genetics and retrograde amnesia and… about how he’d abandoned Sephiroth once, and couldn’t do it again. That took Barret off guard. Vincent echoed Tifa’s statement, echoed Aesis’. _It was true. He’s not the same._ And that was how Sephiroth officially joined the Wutian resistance. Hours passed and the conversation gradually turned to strategy, to how the ex-General’s presence might reshape their fight in Nibelheim. She signed off: _Thank you, Barret. For him, too._ But that got him. _It ain’t about him,_ Barret snapped. _What y’all describe is a… in theory,_ he huffed, _I can allow that it’s a noble struggle, but what he’s done, it’s too much. It’s not about him. It’s about the planet. It’s about I don’t just want to be the next agent of torture and punishment, I want better than Shinra. I want better than him._

He heard her wince.

_We’re fighting for a better world. I…_ She was struggling with something, but not with her conviction. _He’s part of that world,_ she started. _Maybe not yours. He has a place in mine._

_Shit,_ Barret thought. 

_Aesis._

_Yes._

_I gotta talk to him. Not now, ‘cause if I see him now I’ll… I need to see this with my own damn eyes._

As the soldiers again assumed formation, Barret looked at his phone, considering. A missed call from Yuffie. He couldn’t tell her. Not yet.

_—————_

A second night in a row, Aesis was in his arms. His heat brought stillness to her she hadn’t fully realized she was living without. An ancient tension relaxed in her chest, and with it, she felt tears swell automatically, every time. It was as a muscle tearing in a lactic burn had finally, finally, released. She felt an acerbic ache she imagined was like a marathon: at that distance, no matter how painful it was, you wouldn’t really understand how hurt you were until you finally stopped running. This intimacy with him was a new experience for her, it felt like nothing else she’d known. In the solitude of the moment she could observe a passing tremor of fear, a quiver at the thought of allowing herself to be known so closely, cherished so tenderly, by another. By _one_ other. Being with him reminded Aesis of how she felt when she was most deeply present with herself, discovering herself unconditionally, holding herself in sacred love. That experience was her only roadmap, her only sense of what being with him should feel like. Like any map, it offered orientation, it traced safe contours of an experience it could not capture. It was so much more about knowing him, about letting him know her. She blinked into the wetness gathering fresh on her eyeline and stroked silver near Sephiroth’s ear. If it woke him, he didn’t let on.

She watched him with wonder warm in her eyes. She marveled at him. Not as much for his enhanced strength; no matter how it impressed her, living a similar fate gave her a shadowed perspective on their genetic enhancements. She could feel the torture, feel the violation, in which their power was forged. His strength was too fraught, too bloodstained to kindle such tender reverence in her. _No,_ there was something else in Sephiroth. That night, after love that left her gasping, they stayed in bed to learn about each other. He remembered his childhood with few words, staring through the wall behind her. He hated the fluorescent lights that illuminated Shinra’s labs, and remembered most vividly that during tests, he tried to snatch free a single hand to shield his burning eyes from their pearlescent white glare. _That glare,_ he whispered, _was not the sort of light one could escape into, and during the tests, the pressure of his cool hand against his irritated eyes was what helped him imagine something else. Tests_ , experiments he mutely submitted to on the assumption that they were normative of childhood. Aesis could imagine what those experiments involved; her body ached at the memories of her own vivisected tissues and she reached for his arm, for the forearm lesions where they would have measured immunity and healing rates, her lips found the history of organ biopsies written in scars across his abdomen. Sephiroth closed his eyes at her touch, opening them again to watch his own thumb gently massage a circular knot of scar tissue over her liver. 

His assumption of normativity was shattered, he recalled, the first and only time he attempted to describe those tests to another boy in his unit. The boy looked horrified, and worst, his expression held a sharp edge of disgust that Sephiroth immediately understood was directed at him. His alterity was a chasm across from which he observed every conversation the others held, unable to contribute anything of substance that would not overwhelm them. In their company he felt perpetually trapped against the mako tube in which he frequently woke, staring out at the untouchable with his hand pressed against the glass, faintly aware that he had survived something others had not, and bore more than one kind strength they did not understand. They were intimidated by him, afraid of his difference and the violence that contoured it, but he did not understand that. He was never asked what he felt, he never experienced the gentle holding of another helping piece together his emotions, or anyone else’s. He said that when he began counting he knew to rate physical pain on a likert scale, yet he lived every moment of every day with a nebulous, enormous and tunneling urgency that passed unseen and uncomforted and that he could not understand was fear. He felt unique, special, yet he had struggled against a wall of obstinance and withdrawal at the celebrity and entitlements afforded to him when he ascended Shinra’s ranks. He had longed for the intimacy stolen from him, though he could not recognize the cracking discomfort that spilled in his chest and further silenced his tongue as loneliness. _I imagined that my mother would return,_ he whispered, describing details of a fantasy so vivid it was as if he’d lived it. The maternal simulacrum he invented struck Aesis as a projection of his own gentleness, his own quiet and formidable strength; he described a woman he must have stitched together from the strength of his own heart, a woman who would break him free from Shinra’s sterile facilities, a woman who would comfort the endless tension that gripped him. A woman who would hold him with exquisite tenderness and offer in warm love to know his true self, and to let him know hers. How could a man who had only known avarice and abuse create dreams of such reciprocal, gentle love? How could a man who’s entire life had been a lie place such value on authenticity? She saw a light in him that none of humanity’s cruelty, none of Jenova’s grandiosity, had succeeded in diminishing. _Love,_ Aesis realized. _An unbroken love rooted in his soul_ . _So too did defiance_ . Aesis brushed a renegade strand of silver out of his eyes, her own alight in admiration. _He set the stars in her night,_ she thought. _Eventually, he would find his path beyond her war, a path to something more fully his own._ She hoped she could be with him when he did. _Fight or die,_ she remembered, like a reprimand, her stomach turning. Aesis couldn’t believe that earlier, she had the stone cold audacity to tell Barret she could imagine any future that still made sense to her. She’d cauterized all hope, hope to ever find this feeling with another, on the belief that it would cost her mind. But there she was, sane, chronically teary, her heart breaking in the most tender sense of adulation. 

Sephiroth was well awake and only beginning to entertain the idea of finding calm in her gaze. The soft roll of her fingers in his hair took getting used to, and he needed time to realize that the look in her eyes was one of admiration, not of pain. He held her closer, his eyes searching. “It’s hard to know if you’re hurting.”

She shook her head, a more cryptic gesture than he anticipated. There were tears in her eyes. 

“What do you feel, Aesis?”

She leaned forward and kissed him. “I don’t know.”

Her lips stayed close.

“I’m going to make tea. Do you want some?” He shook his head, craning to rest his forehead against the crook of her neck. She leaned to kiss his temple, and lingered.

Sephiroth watched her leave, moonlight tracing the curves of her back. Subtle muscle still warm from his touch moved to stabilize the length of her spine. She slipped on her kimono top, matching pants, the outfit’s silken lining glistening in sharp contrast to the matte viscose that cocooned her, took her body from his view. She slipped from the room, her hand moving through her hair, reestablishing her part in the mess of curls left by his explorations.

He sighed. A simple moment, but it felt exquisite. Too exquisite, too much of something, to feel alone… he dodged into his fantasy of their war. Into a Wutian night, into the oppressive humidity and the sweet smell of grass that lingered in the air as though nature was still dancing in the dew, utterly unbothered. There, he remembered, he felt caged. _I cannot ever leave,_ he imagined telling Aesis what Hojo once told him. _Shinra is the only place for me._ She would have reached for his cheek, her palm soft against his skin. _Who told you that?_ Would he use Hojo’s name? Was there anything else the man would could be called? Without understanding the emotion that swelled to meet her question, could he have dispelled it enough to reply? No, he knew. He would have laughed, ended the conversation. But he could pretend.

_Hojo. My father._

_How could such a cruel man have raised someone like you?_ That, Aesis really had asked him. Before they slept, watching him with her inscrutable eyes, set in that space she couldn’t name, somewhere between joy and pain.

_You do not think me cruel?_

_Your enemies think you cruel. I… don’t see what they do. Not like that._ Her lips pressed together, he imagined the way her eyes would pierce into the reaches of his soul with a calm and recognition he had never experienced before. _I see something different,_ she’d say. _A child soldier._ The cicadas’ hum filled the air and as that unyielding chant blended with the cascades of summer grass, Sephiroth would realize that she had not called herself his enemy.

_Commander._ He would hold her close. _My—_

_What does Hojo tell you about me?_

_That you are deceitful, a liar,_ he knew immediately how Hojo would have described her. As ever, it would read as a biography of the man himself. _That you are a monster._

_Do you think I’m a monster?_

Sephiroth pressed his lips together. _You…_ There was no language for it, even now. _No_ would have to suffice.

_Then perhaps Hojo is wrong._ Her heavy eyes, searching him, loosening the chains that bound him to Hojo’s mind with her vision alone. _Perhaps he has never known who we are._

A litany of scientific jargon filled his mind in protest, a litany of all the things Hojo knew. But Aesis was talking about something else. Some deeper way of knowing. Something that would have baffled that mediocre scientist utterly.

Her fingers in his hair, her lips on his temple. Sephiroth closed his eyes, imagining the hot, wet air of that Wutian night, imagining a General rescued in the eyes of his enemy. It had not happened in the end, not really. In reality, the woman who promised his rescue had been the one who most violated him, most dominated him. In reality, it had been him who saved himself. He was not liberated by an angel of mercy, but by a mad god of war, ferociously thrashing to possess and destroy until finally, finally, he turned his fury against the true source of his suffering. It wasn’t real, this fantasy. Two soldiers, pulling each other from a bloodstained battlefield that rain had long, long ago washed away. That battle was long over, that blood long washed away from all but the stains in his memory. It _couldn’t_ be real. But dear Gods, in the night, he could pretend it was. _My rebel._

Sephiroth fell asleep, imagining their bodies intertwined, breathing to the cicadas’ rhythms, slick with the heat of a clandestine salvation. 

Aesis walked to the kitchen. 

The holiday was a mess from the offset, when the sound of Tifa’s scream sent her running to Ina’s room. When Aesis saw the source of her friend’s shock, she dropped her coffee. There, where she’d expected a stubborn simulacrum of her younger self, she saw someone else entirely. Silver hair, cropped to Ina’s length. Pale, nearly greyscale skin washed in a lavender current, delicate features poking out from behind a curtain of pronounced bangs. Behind them, the unnatural glow of mako eyes, pupils narrowed to a slit flexed as they landed on her. _Sephiroth_ was staring back at her _. A younger Sephiroth. Did Ina…?_

“Isn’t it enough we have one of him?” Tifa barked, undone. Understandably. _How had this happened? The monster whose bite first allowed Ina to transform herself was gone._ “Is Sephiroth making clones?”

Aesis stared at Tifa a moment, speechless, and stammered. “I-Ina?”

Ina appeared nonplussed, but her expression, or lack thereof, bore an uncomfortable similarity to Sephiroth’s reserve. Aesis searched her face, desperate for some gesture, some tic that _felt_ like Ina, and heard it in the vaguely hostile and apathetic tone of the girl’s voice. It was frightening, but familiar, how uncaring and contemptuous the child became when confronted by the emotions of others, and _that,_ that was so unlike Sephiroth’s piqued curiosity. Aesis felt rage boil and choked it down, reminding herself that Ina was a child. She was a child who had been thoroughly abused by men far more unwell than she.

“I like him better,” Ina dismissed them, glaring at Aesis. “He’s stronger than you.”

_Ouch._ She exhaled, taking the hit to her ego. 

“Goddess Minerva.”

When Tifa turned to face her friend, she was glaring too. “How the fuck is this happening, Aesis? Is he making clones? Or is Jenova…?” Tifa couldn’t finish the sentence.

“It’s not Sephiroth,” Aesis replied with certainty. _But Jenova? Oh Gods…_ “Ina, did you say… did you do this to yourself? On purpose?”

“Duh.” Their concern seemed to irritate her.

Then something curious happened. Sephiroth also heard Tifa’s scream, and he came running, pulling on an entirely unbuttoned black shirt up around his shoulders, letting it drape along his bare chest. He stopped dead when got to Ina’s room, jaw slack. When Ina saw him she froze. She didn’t look petrified — she looked absent.

 _Dissociating._ Aesis reached for Ina’s hand and realized the girl was breaking out in hives. _She was terrified of him_ ; fear flooded her body in such overwhelming proportion that her antagonized immune system began to attack _._ Aesis called out Ina’s name, snapping the child from the refuge of her own labyrinthine mind, and started when Ina grabbed her thigh, ducking behind the leg of the woman she’d just totally dismissed.

“Didn’t she think you were garbage, like, two seconds ago?” Tifa asked, irritated.

Aesis nodded. 

“You know,” Tifa grumbled. “I don’t want to be upset with her, but she’s really treating us like shit.”

“Yeah, it’s annoying.” Came Aesis’ curt reply. She spoke next as if drily reading off a medical chart. “Three days ago she was trying to shoot me, so this is improving and we’re working on building her tolerance for others’ minds and feelings, but not, and I can’t stress this enough, _not_ _in the middle of an active meltdown._ ”

The usual tricks didn’t work for Ina. The child couldn’t feel her own heartbeat, couldn’t feel anything in her body, which effectively blocked even the most basic effort to help her identify and regulate her emotions. Trying to pull her attention to her breathing only made her dissociate, it immediately overwhelmed her. There was nothing to do but ride it out. _This will end,_ Aesis said firmly. _It’s going to be okay._

Sephiroth was still stunned. 

“Ina?” He took a step closer as she calmed, piecing together what had happened from the commentary of the others. Eyes like his own stared up at them, their whites the size of dinner saucers. Dissociation holding her memory hostage, it was as if Ina forgot he was there, and when she heard him the terror sprung up anew. “Why have you done this to yourself?”

The question was not as innocuous as he assumed; Ina was screaming, inconsolable. “I think…” Aesis watched her, undone and sobbing. “I think she’s afraid you’re angry with her.”

“No, I…” Sephiroth shook his head, stepping back. Back, intuitively, to the outskirts, where with eyes downcast he so habitually stood apart, knowing his presence would incite fear in those around him. To his shock, Aesis reached for his hand, squeezing his fingers. He looked at her for a moment, inscrutable. “I am concerned for her. Is she so eager to dispose of who she is?” He frowned. “Ina, I am…” Sephiroth looked at Aesis, unsure of what was to come next. She nodded. “I am honored, but I don’t want you to lose who you are. This is the way of madness,” he finished softly. 

Ina squeezed Aesis' leg. “Madness when the seams come apart,” she muttered nonsensically. “Sometimes I’m called Ina but she’s not always real. Different shapes, different shadows. Who’s Ina, like a game but someone always dies.”

“Is it Jenova?” Aesis asked him.

“I don’t feel her,” he replied with his stiff elegance. “I cannot know for sure, but I think if she were back… I would feel it.”

Vincent swallowed. “Aesis, did you say that she first changed her… form…. under this new monster’s influence? That she turned into you?”

“Yes.”

He frowned. “And now, she’s become him.” Vincent shook his head. “I know that Jenova possessed the ability to transform herself, and afforded some version of that power to you, Sephiroth.”

The other man’s brooding appeared intensified. His eyes moved, following the trajectory of some unknown thought process to the wall. “My power was limited to those injected with Jenova’s DNA. Ina should not have access to that. Unless… Could they have experimented on her? Given her an ability more true to Jenova’s?”

Aesis swallowed.

“We need to scan her DNA,” Tifa replied. “I’ll get Medbot ready.”

“No,” Vincent interrupted her, too abruptly. Tifa looked at him in confusion. “I’ll do it.”

It took five minutes and the results were definitive: _Subject Ina’s serum is positive for DNA belonging to tissue sample: Jenova. DNA is active._

Aesis sent out a call for their lifestream readings. Triple-checking, quadruple-checking that Jenova was gone. She sent Ina’s data as well. Barret called back faster than she anticipated.

_Aesis. Doesn’t read same as Jenova, but… there’s something, it’s close enough to the biosignature you got from that kid. Our readings on Midgar are in and out, though. they’re trying to jam our signal. Signal to noise ain’t ideal._

_What’s coming through?_

_Faint trace of somethin’ in the Sector 7 slums, in that old train station—._

_The train graveyard._ Aesis frowned. 

_Somethin’s out there. Before the war, Tifa, Cloud and Aerith went out that way. Back when all this began. Aerith told me stories ‘bout ghosts, ghosts of children ain’t never been played with. Said they haunted that place. Trapped in it._

_Those who lose their way in the dark of night will never, ever find their way home again,_ Tifa volunteered, unsettled. _I thought those children were set free._

_Then Ina, Jenova and this monster are connected to something in the train graveyard?_

_Looks like. That’s the best I can do. Looks like Shinra’s got more tricks up their sleeve, my guess._

A curt nod, eyes flashing in a determined preamble to a plan she hadn’t come up with yet.

_Thank you, Barret._

Vincent was halfway out the door, on his way to the concierge.

“I… need a toothbrush.”

Tifa’s eyes narrowed. 

That was how the holiday began, with a panic that spanned continents. It was a mess. Within the chaos, however, moments of beauty survived. Ina, holding rigidly to Sephiroth’s form and explicit that she nonetheless remained a girl, had apparently developed a rapacious appetite for gingerbread. As she tucked in, illuminated by the faint glow of warm candlelight of their centerpiece, it was a soft and welcome surprise for Aesis that Ina would accept her food. 

Sephiroth drove alone to Lucrecia’s cave, leaving the cut Fleur de Nepenthe Aesis had given him against the stalagmite formations that framed the cave’s mouth. He lingered at the perimeter, avoiding proximity to his mother’s body. He whispered something, thinking of that carnivorous flower, born in scarcity to wrestle life away from those not forced to grow on depleted soil. He didn’t tell Aesis any more than that, but she noticed he’d emerged with more still sadness, with less torrential mourning, than had been in his eyes before. 

She placed a parcel wrapped in a rough press of handmade paper into his grip. Oil paint, enough for a small greyscale, linseed oil. Enough for an offering, not a commission. His breath caught. The card read: _my General, may you fly._ He looked at her for a moment, silent, then offered his thanks in a halted whisper.

Ina could not look at Sephiroth when she accepted his gift; her hives died down, but she never stopped clinging to Aesis and turning her face to look away from him. Nonetheless, when they put her to bed, she wrapped herself like a vice around that moogle, the soft polyester fur and surprisingly hefty weight. Perhaps unaware of the warmer light available from her bedside lamp, Ina lay underneath the burn of white light from recessed bulbs in her ceiling. She twisted her face in discomfort, pressing her hand intuitively to the bridge of her nose. “Hurts... eyes,” Ina mumbled against the back of her wrist, marking the single instance the girl had been able to take word to feeling that day. 

“I have felt that too,” he whispered low from the door to his room, and then, she looked at him. Sephiroth hastily switched off the light.

—————-

Before the chaos later that day, Tifa had already been on edge. Focus furrowed her brow as she squinted into the morning light, confused over the Medbot’s latest AI readout. Two lines of garbled code, encrypted to conceal the results of what she presumed was some sort of medical test. And a toothbrush. Tifa held it uncomfortably close to her face, her puzzled expression deepening. _Why did someone leave their toothbrush in the Medbot?_

It was a welcome distraction from her phone.

_Cloud… It’s the holiday, um. I just hope you’re alright. A lot has happened, and I miss you. I… I can’t explain, not over a message. I— I need you—_

\--If you are finished recording your message, please— 

Tifa couldn’t bring herself to send it.

_Look you motherfucker Sephiroth is back so why don’t you crawl out of your pity party and—_

\--If you are finished recording your message, please— 

Tifa sighed, deleted, and recorded her final message. 

“Happy Krampnach, Cloud.” 

“I hate to interrupt… whatever this is.” 

A voice of patrician velvet, but Tifa felt relieved for the company. “Madam M.” She turned to acknowledge her, relaxing her grimace only a little, and turned back to the toothbrush. 

“So you are in love with him? Cloud?”

“Aesis… She doesn’t understand,” Tifa pressed her lips together. “She doesn’t like him. She says it’s because she hates how he treats me, and fine, but.. Sephiroth treated me worse.” Tifa laughed humorlessly. “I think it’s because she’s too much like him. Sephiroth. She understands him, what he went through. She doesn’t have that kind of reference point for Cloud. You just know that even before the genetic splicing and the mako, before they put her through the hell that forged her magic, she was always going to be fiercely smart, fiercely strong.” 

Madame M arched a judgmental eyebrow. “Or arrogant.” 

“You can check your misogyny at the door, M,” Tifa snorted. “If I described a man that way you wouldn’t think he was arrogant, you’d be salivating. And you know it’s true.” Madam M sucked in her cheek, nodding the point as if it suddenly didn’t matter. “It’s who she is, and it’s not always a good thing,” Tifa continued. “Cloud wasn’t like that, and she doesn’t get it. I don’t always think she has a lot of sympathy.” 

“Hm,” Madam M frowned. “The Cloud I met was incredibly strong.” 

“The Cloud you met was scarred,” Tifa considered. “Scar tissue is strong, but it’s softness underneath. He didn’t grow up in this, you know? Aesis and Sephiroth did, it’s… different. It just feels different with them.” Tifa shook her head. “Cloud was sweet, loved, he wasn’t born to be this ferocious thing with cutting intelligence and raw power and incomprehensible wells of resilience. He was kind of a dork, really, but he… he wasn’t like them. He never, _ever,_ thought he was good enough, he _always_ felt defective. He wanted to prove himself. He wanted to be a hero.”

Madam M watched Tifa with knowing eyes. “Whose hero?”

“Ostensibly, me,” Tifa replied immediately, then sighed. “But now I don’t think it was ever really about me. He never talks about his past, but I know his dad left when he was young. Sephiroth… killed his mom. In the massacre. Yeah,” Tifa nodded at Madam M’s shocked expression. “He killed my dad, too. And Aerith.” 

“It’s a wonder you can be in the same room with him.” 

Tifa looked sad. “It was his sword, but I do think he was brainwashed,” she replied, mulling over the evolution of her feelings. “It’s impossible for me not to recognize that he was a victim too. What Shinra and Jenova did to him I can’t even imagine, and I used to be so confident that if the same thing had happened to me, I’d have done differently, but… now I’m not so sure. I can’t bring myself to hate him anymore. ” 

Madam M said nothing.

“Anyway,” Tifa hastily continued. “After Aerith, Cloud couldn’t keep it together.” With a disintersted wave of her fan, Madam M brusquely asked if Cloud had been in love with the flower girl. The question bristled in Tifa’s skin. “I don’t know,” she answered finally. “I don’t think he ever… got over his mom. Maybe he’s always been fighting for her, in one way or another, and Aerith…” 

“Always the mother.”

“She loved him. She was very kind. She hurt though, you know.” she said. “I don’t think he’s ever let himself off the hook from saving her.” 

“Men think that so often, don’t they,” Madam M replied, her voice uncharacteristically soft. “Children trying desperately to rescue the adult women they love. It’s a doomed enterprise. Be careful, Tifa. The flip side of that helplessness is rage.” 

Tifa shifted uncomfortably. “You don’t know him. He’s a sweet person, but he’s been hurt so badly. He just… doesn’t know how to respond. He needs time.” 

Madam M’s smile was not unkind. “I have no doubt of his pain, Tifa, but silence is a response.” 

Tifa shook her head, and finally stood. “Aesis was right,” she muttered. “You are an absolute bitch.” 

“I’m going to check on Ina,” she muttered as she left. 

———

She found her friend in the kitchen that night. The two silently prepared tea, neither speaking.

“So was it good?” Tifa finally asked.

Aesis blew air into her cheeks and looked away.

“You went from _I don’t know if he’s a red flag_ to sleeping with him for two consectuve days? You realize _that_ in and of itself is a red flag, right?”

“I am aware,” Aesis replied shortly. “It gets worse.”

She told Tifa about the beach in Wutai; only days ago, in a different timeline, she had wrestled herself from a murderous trauma bond with him while a younger and nearly psychotic Sephiroth tasted her naked chest. “That,” Aesis gestured at her tea, “ _cannot_ be healthy.”

“So you were like, full on, no holds-barred, seriously fighting each other, and wound up bonding while fighting and saving each other and nearly fucking on a beach?”

“When you put it that way it sounds sexy,” she smirked. “I mean… At the time it also felt horrifying. It felt wrong.”

“What about this?”

“This feels… so different,” She shook her head. “It feels right.”

“That means you’re a supervillain now, right? You’re going batshit insane, planning to destroy the planet, that sort of thing?”

“Probably,” Aesis replied with feigned nonchalance. “I don’t think we can stop it.”

Tifa laughed humorlessly and shook her head. “I wish I’d known him before,” she said finally, her tone serious. “I don’t think he would have ever made much sense to me, but if he was like he is now, I think I would have liked him well enough.”

“I don’t think he was like this,” Aesis replied softly. “He was still so unstable. Professional, very, loyal, but god forbid anyone cracked that shell…” She shook her head. “To overpower Jenova, he had to find himself. He couldn’t do much self-reflection in SOLDIER, no one ever offered to know him, to let them know him… he had no way to voice any of it. I think he so deeply longed to.”

“I might still have been his friend,” Tifa replied sadly. “You were a bitter asshole _and_ a shell when we met, and I still liked you.” Aesis arched her eyebrow and took the point. “But you’re saying the person I would have liked is only available now. After... everything.” Her friend nodded, and Tifa shook her head. “How have we made such a mess of this world, Aesis? I’m fighting a war with my greatest enemy. When I look at him, I still see my father, I see Aerith. Aerith, every time. But the sting is dulling, and who he is… What does it make me if I forgive that? What does it make me if I don’t?”

Aesis thought a moment and looked away, speaking with a vulnerability that surprised Tifa.

“Where does it leave us?”

“If you have to ask that you can fuck right the hell off.”

Aesis smiled. 

“I do feel more distance,” Tifa admitted. “Between us. And it’s not just that I was furious with you. It’s that when you’re with him, it’s like you two speak a language I don’t understand. It makes me feel so… inadequate.”

Aesis looked at her friend for a few moments, her eyes narrowing in a discerning irritation. “Would you prefer to be the one fucking me?” 

Tifa laughed. “No, not at all,” she answered. “I… I’ve been feeling inadequate with Cloud too, I guess, but I can’t talk to him about it. Maybe it’s all landing on you. But I do feel it with you, too… The, um, inadequacy, I mean. Like if I try to reach you, I can’t. And Sephiroth can.”

“He lived it,” Aesis replied softly. “He _felt_ it. He can touch scars on my body and I _feel_ his understanding… and what it means, to _share_ this with another, is… I feel human,” she whispered. “It doesn’t mean you’re inadequate, Tif. I love you so much, I know I let you down when I brought him here.”

Tifa’s lips curled into a conflicted smile.

“The worst part is that the more I see of him, the more I believe it. That he wasn’t evil. That he was brainwashed. So much destruction, and at the core of all of it… a boy, lost and longing, furious, _used_ over and over and over again.”

“He plucked that boy out of hell,” her friend whispered. “He was like vapor in Jenova’s air, he says it that way. He was as shattered as anything I can imagine. Every link of identity severed, every memory lost. He must have wrestled himself together an atom at a time.”

“He needed Cloud and Aerith to do it, and he took them,” Tifa added archedly. “But your point stands. That he came back from that… he did it with casualties. Jenova’s casualties, but maybe also still his. I wish I could see her. Aerith,” Tifa sighed. “I wish she could tell me it’s okay, that it doesn’t betray her memory to… Forgive. Move on to a world with him in it when she can’t be here.” 

“We wanted a better way,” Aesis remembered. For the most part, she was genuinely asking. “Is that forgiveness?”

Tifa frowned, her eyes flashing at Aesis’ audacity. “Forgiveness instead of vengeance. This, and you let SOLDIERs who fought you escape in Junon? You’re starting to sound like a pacifist.” 

Aesis smirked. “Come closer and say that.” 

Her friend chuckled, considering how to negotiate her irritation. “Alright, Ae. Let me turn that around. Would you forgive Shinra?”

“How is that the same?” Aesis returned. “Shinra is the seething heart of a colonial empire, they hoard power with unchecked greed. They regulate their existence on an entitlement to pillage. They believe themselves inherently superior to everyone on Gaia.”

“Sounds like the theme song to your boyfriend’s breakdowns.”

“His theme song would be better than that,” her lip twitched. “But no, it’s not the same. I’m not justifying what he did, just noticing a real difference. Sephiroth didn’t feel personally victimized when you fought him, he wanted that. From what he’s told me… he asked how Cloud felt in part because something left of him was really trying to understand. He knew, on some level, that if he could understand how Cloud felt, he could put back the pieces of himself.” Tifa reacted, and Aesis added, “He was murderous, too subjugated to Jenova’s ambition, too shattered to find a moral path, but he still _wanted_ to understand who he was. Shinra fights, but if you try to fight back Shinra will truly believe _you’re_ victimizing _them_ . Heidegger, Palmer, Scarlet, Rufus, they _tantrum_. They have no interest in what you feel, no interest in your perspective or in cultivating their own self-awareness. They’re not fighting to reclaim themselves, to know themselves, or to know anyone else. They’re fighting to destroy what is real within them and obliterate anyone who challenges their bullshit mythology of superiority.”

“Then your forgiveness has its limits?”

“I don’t know. Maybe,” Aesis sighed. “Even if I could understand their pain, and forgive it,” Aesis’ eyes narrowed. “My tolerance sure as hell does.”

Tifa looked at her friend. “Ae, I realize that was still basically a death threat, but I’ve never heard you say something that… compassionate… about Shinra before.” 

Aesis grunted.

“So you’d forgive them, but kill them anyway?”

She shook her head, baffled by herself.

“Maybe I would.”

_A pacifist?_ Aesis thought back to earlier that day. On the phone with Barret, on the subject of Corneo.

_I’m not playing this game,_ she sneered into the phone. _I’m not going to sit here clutching my pearls and wondering where I fall in his ring, Barret. The second that piece of shit decided to traffic children and infect them with Jenova’s cells was the second he made this very, very personal. He is trapped in this ring with me._ Aesis curled her lip into an expression she knew Barret was going to call out. She didn’t know Corneo at all, but she still felt like she’d been born with a map of his gangrenous soul burned into her like a native language. His tricks were Shinra’s, and to survive, she had to understand their violence better than they did, she had to be better at it than they were. If it meant saving those children, understand what was happening to Ina, she had no moral qualm using her expertise to turn their violence around. She had always, _always_ recognized the moral authority of those ground under Shira’s boot in turning the violence of their subjugation against their oppressors. That day, as she had for so many years, she trusted the authority in herself. _Fine. He wants to create chaos,_ her jaw steeled.

_Let’s teach this motherfucker the definition of chaos._

_Aesis, you’re a piece of work, ya know that?_

Her eyebrow twitched. _I do._

_Gods help him._

She returned to Sephiroth’s bed. The cool tones of moonlight brushed the fine edge of his nose, pulling out the subtle lavender of his pale skin. She sat there, an inch away, her fingers laced with his. 

She wasn’t a pacifist. What was she meant to do with peace?

_—————_

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed it! I welcome hearing your reaction, especially if you did.
> 
> One of the broader developmental themes of this story is going to be exploring how, and if, two people forged in violence can create a reciprocal and safe relationship. My OC has always defined herself as a warrior, and functions better in rage, violence and chaos than she does in peace. She also craves healing and safe, healthy love, so I’m excited to see how that can happen on a backdrop of revolution.


	23. Nibelheim files: Abzu ex machina pt 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Heyyyy hi so. I’m back 😬 all the usual CWs apply.
> 
> Aesis goes for a run, haunted by the memories of Shinra’s gaslighting, needing distance from Sephiroth.  
> Ms. Folia arrives.  
> Sephiroth and Ina get to know each other.  
> Corneo’s plot is set in motion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song for this Chapter is Flash by Joan as Police Woman. 
> 
> I wanted to explore the legacy of gaslighting more in depth, and see what happens when, as is inevitable, these two traumatized murder kitties get triggered. Much brooding will ensue. 
> 
> I’ve been in kind of a brooding mood I got nothing.
> 
> Also plot though!

_ Aesis, we have another problem. _

Her foot hit the Nibeli desert terrain, ground softer than she expected. Everything about the depleted forests seemed to challenge her expectations, it even felt harder to observe, as if some unseen force was closing in on her vision. Myopia, her mind was refusing to see, struggling to really feel. It was too much. She’d spent three nights with him, three days near him. The feel of his body lingered, in her and around her, the smell of leather and musk, the creamy tuberose florals and vanilla of his shampoo and the smoked notes of hinoki cedar that lingered on his chest, on her tongue, after he bathed. It came on so abruptly, on a wave of guilt. She just shut down.  _ Were there signs? Was there a build-up of some emotion, a gnawing urge to create distance? Probably.  _ It was too easy to ignore those signs, to annihilate them like dust in the wind before they could even reach her consciousness. It was a reflex tortured children learned to survive, she knew, a reflex to annihilate the emotions and desires that signaled she wanted distance, she wanted to stop. Decades later, Aesis still sometimes missed those signs, let them build and build until an urgency that has nothing to do with anything overtook her. Every time that happened, despite herself, she felt a little insane. This time, it was fear. She knew the fear was old, it felt more ancient than time and spilled in unformed agitation through her senses without any apparent cause.  _ Terror,  _ everywhere, and she needed to run. She explained what was happening, or tried to. She needed to move away but didn’t want to hurt him. His reaction, probably to the fear in her eyes, was unreadable. Distant.  _ Asshole.  _ Aesis tore through miles alone in the Nibeli desert, alternating between terror and a completely disproportionate rage.  _ Asshole _ .  _ She was afraid. She was ashamed, for some reason. In shame her rage took a hairpin trigger.  _ Her path twisted onto the scorched earth, the canyons and rocks, winding up to the charred remains of the reactor, destroyed in their battle with Leviathan.

It wasn’t until her feet hit unpaved ground that Aesis was able to fully understand what she was running from. As intrusive as lighting, and as quick, she remembered her head snapping into unconsciousness. The hard echo of some smack, some hit, ricocheting through her core. She felt the first millisecond of a breaking bone.  _ That was it.  _ The broken bones. Remodeled fractures all over her body, trophies left from Shinra’s sadism, their punishments. Experiments. The terror was too raw, too spun out of control and out of reality. She couldn’t outthink it. Couldn’t numb it. She had to trust her body to survive it.

_ Should she fight, and remind herself that now, she could? Should she meditate, breathe into the terror until her body recalibrated? No.  _ Her body said run, so she kept going, leaning into reckless speeds for the distance, letting memories crack into her consciousness like an electric storm.  _ A guard _ .  _ The only guard she’d ever liked.  _ She  _ felt  _ the memory, and it nearly brought her to the ground. _ He was cavalier,  _ Aesis remembered,  _ he resonated with easy warmth and winked when he dropped her off at Hojo’s lab. She remembered the flash in his blue eyes, like a twinkle that made her feel she was the only girl in the world.  _ Aesis picked up the pace.  _ In that moment, she felt, everything was going to be okay.  _ But it wasn’t.  _ That light in his eyes became dull. She was calling for him, so desperate, calling, angrier now. Why wouldn’t that twinkle shine in his eyes? She was still the same, and hadn’t that light been for her? Dull eyes, sinking stomach. He didn’t care. Blue eyes blank with rage. He was breaking her arm.  _ They reassigned him to a nearby cage and when she saw him offer that wink to another girl, another subject, that had been what hurt the most.  _ What had she done?  _ It was pain, shame, easy enough to stall out in, but something clicked for the first time that day in the Nibeli wasteland. Something Aesis hadn’t considered before.  _ The other subject, her name was 41-C. When he took her away, he took her in the direction of the old staircase. That motherfucker had winked at 41 right before he took her to be murdered.  _

_ After, they’d taken Aesis into some sort of hearing. A panel of frightening men, Hojo sat in the middle, flanked by two women whose dead eyes sneered a fake concern that was more frightening still. It was two months later, probably, maybe six. That same guard stood, his feet wide, anchored to the ground with his arms crossed over his chest as if he commanded the vicissitudes of time itself. Tall, but also ridiculous, puffed up with pursed lips like a toddler impersonating a cartoon villain. It took her a moment to realize it wasn’t a joke. His accusations, ‘oppositional, histrionic lies” and “hostile toward staff” and “possibility of psychosis” followed by a “or maybe she’s just a sociopath”. Three scientists, sociopathic torturers all, contorted their faces in a performance of curiosity, and she stood with her mouth open, wanting to scream that none of that had anything to do with reality, that of course she was angry, he’d broken her arm. He killed 41. She knew they all knew it, wasn’t that why they’d taken her off his rotation? She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. _

_ “Hysterical little bitch.” _

She spent a month in the tombs after that meeting, in the cage where they kept her, waiting to claim her and drain every last drop of life from her, to preserve her as a dead doll pillaged of opposition, of reality, of thought. It was the fact of her voice, not her words, they attacked: when she spoke what she felt her affect was labile, a symptom of some kind of madness, and when she spoke what they wanted to hear, her affect was flat, a symptom of some other madness. A month wasting in their dungeons, marinating in their medications, in experiments that marred her mind more than her flesh. When she learned to cry without feeling anything, when she took torture without breaking eye contact, when she didn’t die, the scientists decided to keep her alive longer. Hojo, in particular, seemed to delight in that specific demonstration of her resilience. 

That guard. His blue, twinkling eyes, like she mattered. That was what started it. 

A month in the tombs, her mind undone in the labile lull of their tranquilizers, drugs that birthed the mood swings they’d already condemned her for, drugs that birthed the paranoia they’d already accused her of. She wondered if she’d fabricated the memories of her humerus snapping, pulled memories of an assault out of thin air.  _ Was it real? Was she real? Was she wrong? Was she insane?  _ Marinating in rage, shame stagnant like a rock in her stomach. She felt worthless. She felt  _ crazy _ .

At that, Aesis stopped running and dropped her weight to scream as loud as she could, her cry cutting the desert air.

Her bones knew the truth. 

Her body knew the truth.

She screamed, bones alive in rage. 

It all clicked.  _ Tuberose, creamy floral aphrodisiac,  _ the light shining in Sephiroth’s mako iris when their eyes met, shining in reverence. Her hips, moving around him, drunk on the kindling feeling he brought to a blaze in her. His eyes.  _ Shining.  _ That guard’s, dull. The crack of her arm breaking. Her mind shattering.  _ Her body had learned to be terrified of eyes that told her she was special.  _ Aesis felt tension release, her diaphragm dropped to catch a grounding breath.  _ That was it,  _ It made sense to her now, this shift in her rhythms.  _ She remembered the torture, the gaslighting. The gaslighting, soul-excoriating, worst than any torture had ever been _ . 

She wanted to kill that guard. She wanted to hit, and hit, wanted the steel plates that decorated her knuckles in claws to bash his skull until those blue eyes of his were nothing but gelatinous blood and aqueous humor dripping off her murderous hands. She wanted to laugh, wanted that laugh of bloodlust ripped from her gut on a wave of  _ pleasure _ . Of  _ release. Of revenge. The gaslighting.  _ It was the gaslighting that brought her rage to its most sadistic, most ugly, most unholy boil. 

Killing him wouldn’t bring her relief, she knew, not for long. Guilt, horrible shame, would follow. 

_ War,  _ Aesis remembered.  _ And redemption.  _

_ Tuberose. Touch. _

The stories they created together, bodies weaving fantasy in his bed.

_ They created.  _ Aesis breathed, deeper, steadier. Deeper and steadier. They were creating something, something built of smell and touch and fantasy and passion, and that relieved her rage as well. With time, the echoes of the trauma dulled, and save fatigue, she was back. She was in the Nibeli wasteland. The ground was soft, depleted to sand. The air smelled crisp and ashen, the sky rolled with the foreboding of grey clouds. Shinra wasn’t there, at least not yet.  _ What that guard had done wasn’t about her,  _ Aesis thought as she took in the landscape. She remembered 41, marched to the incinerator.  _ That guard was just a liar who liked to wink at little girls before he killed them.  _

_ Disgusting. _

Sephiroth has done nothing wrong, she realized, save to look at her as if she was his moon in the dark of night. She reveled in his intensity, yet it stirred her fear. It stirred those memories. His intensity upset something in her, some delicate equilibrium that teetered into an all-consuming rage, a soul-deep rage.

Aesis breathed.  _ Perhaps,  _ she thought,  _ it could be soothed in creation, instead.  _ She ran again, creating heat, creating rhythm. Like a bird in the wind.

After ten miles, breathing, the wind cool on her face and the impact surging through the powerful lift of her body, she could think about other things.

Her most recent conversation with Madam M. The war on their horizons.

_ Corneo’s been paying off the business elite,  _ Madam M informed her.  _ He calls them relocation incentives but really they’re just bribes. He lures them here, then follows with blackmail once they’re in too deep. He owns them. If any of their employees push back against Corneo… _

_ Then their employees will fight against us? _

_ I don’t know what they’ll do. They won’t be on our side, that’s for sure. Not until we take Corneo down. _

_ You might have mentioned that, Mimi. _

_ I’m mentioning it now.  _ Her matrician eyebrow, that precise line smudged just enough to give the center of her brow the appearance of human hair.  _ I have an informant, he’s…  _ Madam M narrowed her eyes and said something vague about the man’s character that Aesis loosely translated to mean  _ good in bed. Don’t give me that look, Aesis. Your revolution is failing because you underestimated this corruption. It has always existed, it is the poisonous root feeding Shinra’s rebirth. Cauterize it, Aesis, and I’ll get your team the IDs you need to go undercover in Midgar. That’s our deal. _

_ Mimi, we need to change our plan. _

_ Ivan will help. _

Aesis stopped again, her hands on her knees. Running her trauma into literal ground was always uniquely exhausting. In retrospect Mt. Nibel, still infested with Corneo’s goons, might not have been the safest choice for a PTSD-fueled speedwork session. Even the foundation, even in an elite warrior… her heartrate’s ability to adjust, her ability to catch her breath, all of it felt a little off.  _ That was the impact of trauma. _

It wasn’t off enough to impact her hearing. Voices, male, two distinct registers behind her. Aesis ducked behind a large rock, her eyes steeling over, her breath finding its slow, steady feet as she waited, deliberating how she’d fight them.  _ Weapons? Did she even want weapons?  _ She was more in the mood for body shots, strikes she knew would break bones. Cracking ribs, snapping arms _. She wanted to redistribute the pain of her past. Again.  _

_ Maybe,  _ Aesis thought,  _ kill now, create later. _

_ Could she bear the shame, if she acted on that impulse?  _

_ Damn it. _

She waited.

“It was over here,” one of Corneo’s goons muttered. “Think one of ‘em tried to escape and got caught on the wrong end of a monster?” A natural blonde, from the look of it, light ashen hair and defined muscle rippling beneath and undershirt two sizes too small. Aesis noticed a tattoo snaking along the contours of his swollen bicep, the outline of some animal, some apex predator, perhaps a dragon.  _ Well,  _ she rolled her eyes, her muscle tensing for the fight.  _ Isn’t he an optimist.  _

_ Maybe she’d just crack his jaw. _

Apex’s partner shrugged. “Boss don’t care, I don’t care. We’ll just tell ‘em she misbehaved. Got hers.”

Aesis felt her stomach clutch as murder swelled under her skin. Sex traffickers accusing their victims of misbehaving.  _ The gaslighting. The projection. _

_ Could she handle the shame if she broke them into pieces?  _

_ Probably.  _

Her eyes narrowed.

_ What was it Barret liked to say? _

_ That would get her damn near to good. _

Aesis moved into a strike, but stopped as Apex continued speaking, dodging to hide behind another tree just as he turned around. He squinted, eyes searching, then shrugged and continued.

“Boss’ll care if the big fish gets out though, and you know we’re taking all her girls too. We gotta make sure those locks are working. We don’t have a lot of time, not if he wants this done by morning.”

Aesis decided, for reasons she didn’t fully understand, to withhold from her sadistic caprice. She used the energy to instead toss a stone in the direction opposite her and waited while the goons left to investigate, ready to sprint for the inn. Reenacting the ancient cycles of her violence would have to wait, she thought.  _ In the big picture, two goons didn’t matter _ . Corneo was moving on Madam M faster than they thought.

_ She needed to protect her friends. _

—————-

Sephiroth studied the horizon, brooding miles 

deep in his own mind. Vincent has asked him a question about Aesis, one Sephiroth had hardly known how to answer.  _ Was she alright?  _

She’d been afraid. It chilled him,  _ sickened  _ him, seeing fear in her eyes that way, as he had never seen it before. Not in torture. Not in battle. Whatever it was that could frightened her, he could not imagine it.  _ Was it in him?  _ The thought stiffened him against the shifting storm clouds, uneven strokes of grey blown in by evening winds. He felt the serrated edge tracing his rib cage contract, locking his posture. His jaw set. He could not shake the feeling he’d done something wrong.

_ Didn’t you, asshole? _

_ Cloud’s voice.  _ Cloud’s face flashed in his mind, uninvited. He shook his head in reflex, hiding behind the shadow of his hooked brow, the sight of the sky obscured in the length of his silver bang.

_ You know what you do to the people you love. What you did to me. To my friends.  _

A flash of metal.  _ Brown hair, Lucrecia… No.  _ Aerith. His fist curled.  _ Aerith.  _ He was walking, a hotel room. Cheap. Slums. The muffled thud of the buster sword’s dull edge striking some ceiling fixture as his eyes locked onto Cloud.  _ Cloud, falling backwards. Hands on him, leather gloves touching him, the thin length of their fabric all that shielded Cloud’s bare shoulder… Sephiroth laid over him, an almost shy sort of sadism glowing in his eyes, swelling in confidence, in glee, at the sight of Cloud’s fear. Had he— No. _

_ You know what you do to the people you love. _

Hojo.

_ Sephiroth, you are the greatest of my creations. _

Hojo’s contempt. 

_ You’ve always been an adequate killer. _

Sephiroth’s own.

_ Don’t pretend that you have feelings— _

_ You were the one without feelings, you pathetic son of a bitch. Maybe she finally saw you. Saw that in you. She must be terrified of you. _

_ No. _

The pressure of his gritting teeth braced in a tension that pulled him back to the reactor, back to Genesis —  _ No.  _ He fought it. He did not want to return there. 

_ You’ve always been this way. You know you have. Jenova was just an excuse. _

Then he was in Wutai.

The fear  _ left _ when the battle started. He didn’t understand how. A twelve-year old boy, silver hair and preternatural focus, drawing a sword; he felt terror before the fight, but when the killing started, it was  _ fun _ . Endorphins, raging; there was no pain. The  _ morale _ , that the only time the emotional deadness he knew where people should have been lifted and he  _ felt _ the connection he craved with the others. He could not tell where they ended, where he began, and incredibly, they seemed to feel the same; he moved with them in unison. The weapons. The armor. The orders screamed out over the cacophony. The  _ challenge,  _ as he pushed to his limits. For a child, it was  _ fun.  _ It was, paradoxically, the safest he’d ever felt.

_ No. _

_ Yes,  _ Cloud hissed.  _ This is who you’ve always been. Monster. _

He wanted Aesis to return. It was unbearable, standing alone with those memories, chasing the shame down a rabbit hole of horrors and wondering if he’d be able to live with himself at the end of it.  _ He had changed,  _ he tried to remind himself.  _ He had fought to reclaim his humanity. He had committed to redemption. What more could he do?  _ Nothing. The shame seemed infinite, dominating his horizons and hissing  _ she must have come to her senses. Monster. Monster. You don’t deserve— _

His breath came out tense, shaking.

“Are you alright?”

There was more caution in her voice than concern.  _ Tifa.  _ No. A moment earlier he’d longed for company, but the moment she arrived he ricocheted into a desperation for solitude. 

“I…” Sephiroth shook his head. “Please let me be.”

Tifa crossed her arms across her chest. “If you’re upset,” she said drily, ignoring his request. “Maybe you should talk about it before it turns into a whole thing.”

His breath caught. 

“I— Is Aesis… afraid… that I will hurt her?”

“Oh. She bolted, didn’t she,” Tifa breathed. “If she was afraid of that, Sephiroth, she wouldn’t go for a jog. You wouldn’t be walking freely in this room.” A pause followed, a suspicious one. “Should she be?”

“I— No,” he replied, still staring out the window, Tifa barely in his eyeline.  _ Shouldn’t she?  _ He opened his mouth to speak, but heard her words before his own could form.

“Usually,” Tifa rolled her eyes, as she had taken to doing when she made the reluctant decision to help him, “when Ae takes off like that, it’s because she feels like she’s going crazy. They did a number on her mind, you know, they tried to brainwash her. That was the worst of it for her.”

“I understand that,” he whispered. “Tifa, I… Jenova had done that to me. Gaslighting, brainwashing. Her voice was in my mind, indistinguishable from my own… reshaping my thoughts, my perceptions... I did not know where my experience, my feelings ended, where hers began. I could not see how mad I had become. She invaded me, I say this to you because I… know I did something similar. To your friend. To… Cloud.”

Tifa stiffened, visibly surprised as Sephiroth veered a sharp exit from his self-pity into remorse. “Yes,” was all she said.

“I enjoyed it.”

“You made that aggressively obvious at the time.”

“When they made me fight, in SOLDIER, I was a child,” he replied in a subdued, almost mechanical tone. “The most horrific aspect of that for me, of all the bloodshed, was that when the fighting began, as a child, I was not horrified. Before, I was too terrified to bear it; afterward… I can’t describe what I felt afterward.” He shook his head, denying lethal shame its name. “The violence, the... challenge... of fighting, itself, that felt... fun.”

Tifa frowned. “When I met you, Sephiroth, violence didn’t bring you joy. Nothing did.”

“I was horrified of that part of myself, I could not bear to… be… myself. Not outside of a challenge. As with Genesis, as with Cloud. They challenged me, made me feel… what I felt in battle, as a child. Connection. When you met me, I was so far away from myself, I felt… cauterized. Mechanical.”

“And Jenova brought you back to joy. That child’s sadism. I felt that in you that night, in Nibelheim. I didn’t realize it came because you were a child soldier.” Tifa whispered. “Kids can’t understand what fighting really means… what a twisted, sick exploitation of that…” She shook her head, “It’s still in you, isn’t it?”

He didn’t answer. 

“Did Cloud leave because I made him feel insane?”

“Probably,” she answered, as harshly as she felt. Sephiroth winced, appreciating her emotional candor. Her authenticity. “I think he also left because… because you killed Aerith.” The words were slow, smoldering fury, each one meant to wound. He let them, and took the shame. “He couldn’t save her from you. I don’t think he knows who he is anymore.”

“He never did,” Sephiroth replied, remembering suddenly. Tifa looked surprised. “I realized that when I was in his mind, that he had never known who he was. It made him vulnerable. As it made me. We, neither of us, could bear to understand who we were.” The clouds rolled, thickening shadows over exhausted terrain. Sephiroth’s eyes narrowed. “This means that I did to him precisely what Jenova was doing to me. I am ashamed.”

“That’s… an appropriate way to feel,” Tifa replied. 

“I could not understand what was happening to me,” he continued. “I could not make it known to another in any other way. I used him to understand myself.”

“He hasn’t recovered from that,” Tifa replied. It was an accusation. She paused, then asked, “Were you in love with him, Sephiroth?”

Sephiroth didn’t reply.

“You need to tell Aesis. Whatever this is, you need to just fucking talk to her. Don’t you dare do the things that happened to you to any more of my friends.”

Sephiroth turned away, hiding behind his hair.

“And… Maybe apologize to him. If we ever find him, tell him what happened. Tell him you’re sorry. He’ll probably never stop hating you,” he heard something defensive in her tone, and could have sworn for a moment that she sounded jealous, “but that would help him heal, I think. Remorse.”

Tifa’s phone rang.

—————-

Ina was in his room. He saw her, saw himself; the lanky, awkward frame and oversized ears he’d once carried turned away from him, beneath a hastily cropped silver bob. Chopped, as his own had once been, the casualty of an unhinged scientist’s derisive attempt to style hair. She sat with a wooden training sword on her lap. He made a mental note that she was stealing from their weapons store.  _ Of course she was. _

“I want to learn,“ Ina interrupted defensively, as if reading his mind. “If I can use this no one will ever hurt me again.”

Sephiroth frowned. “You lack discipline,” he replied without thinking. “You lack empathy. Honor.” For an instant, he had the bizarre sensation that he was speaking to himself.  _ No. He had always been disciplined. _

But for a moment, he didn’t know where he ended, where she began, staring at him with his own eyes.

“They told me it was because of who I was,” she replied, and his stomach twisted. “Told me it was ‘cause… I was born to be used. That was all I was alive for, said… You’re alive to be used. Be weak.” 

_ I own you,  _ he remembered.

She turned the sword in her hand. “If I could fight like you it would change their minds real quick.”

“Yes,” Sephiroth contemplated. “If you had that power, I imagine they’d believe anything you told them to.”

Ina cackled but didn’t look at him.  _ She was afraid of him too.  _ Tension pulled to his chest, wracking his brain for the appropriate thing to say to a child. Was he speaking to a child? To a soldier? To a torture survivor? How could she be all three? He shifted in discomfort. “Why do you need empathy to kill people?” Ina asked, apprehending him, and his thought process stalled. Sephiroth’s jaw tensed.  _ Good question.  _

“You’re like her,” Ina snapped in inpatient, violently accusatory criticism, taking the air before he could respond. “She wants me to feel what other people feel, but…” 

Intuitively, he stepped into the corner of the room and sat, watching the large eyes of a child like himself turn to him in confession. Serpentine pupils, lost in the hostility of their own armor, unable to tell, perhaps, where the sharp edges of armor ended and where she began. He wondered.  _ Had Ina ever had her own mind? Or had she only ever been told who she was? _

“Do you feel anything, Ina? Anything at all?”

A fly blew into the room, the hum of its wings lit up in his ears. The black dot of its form danced in the shadow of grey light peaking through the east-facing blinds, tracing faint bars across Ina’s face like the bars of a cage. As his eyes moved, so did hers. Sephiroth wondered if Ina had acquired his enhanced hearing, his exquisite reflexes. She looked at the fly, then back at him.  _ Did she feel anything at all?  _

“No.”

_ She was lying. _

Sephiroth’s eyes narrowed into a knowing half smirk. He shrugged. “Then do you feel the tension?” He asked. Ina’s eyes widened.

“Do you feel it now?”

Slowly, she nodded.

Sephiroth sighed. His tongue was heavy in his mouth, he felt himself pulling away, wanting to recede to the frontiers of the room, fighting against the impulse to withdraw. “You seem afraid of me,” he said finally, finding language for it at last.What he wished he had said to Aesis. What he wished he had said to Ina the moment he entered the room. Her eyes widened, she looked down immediately, protesting that she was not. “Who we are is built of what we feel, Ina. We cannot know who we are unless we understand what we feel. What we really feel. Not what we  _ wish  _ we felt.” 

Ina turned away.

“You do not understand what you feel, nor know who you are. Without an identity built of feeling, yes, of… empathy,” he frowned, thinking of Cloud, then Aesis, “of understanding yourself in another, of understanding another in yourself, if I teach you to use that sword, then I will feel no better than those men. Without an identity built of feeling, if I teach you, then killing will be all that you are, all that gives you comfort.” The fly moved through the air, closer to his hand. It landed on the leather of his glove, just under the knuckle of his left index finger. Sephiroth’s eyes narrowed, sparking in rage as he thought of Jenova.  _ A tool.  _ His hand stayed still. 

“That is all you will be, killing. And they will use you. All you will be, again, is used.”

Ina winced. She turned back to face him, long arm, boney elbow, wide mako eyes. His own younger form was searching his eyes with something that looked like desperation. When she spoke next, her voice,  _ his  _ voice, was shaking. It caught him off guard. 

“W-What if it’s too late? What if that’s already all that… already all I am? U… Used? Killing?”

Sephiroth swallowed. 

“Then…” he fumbled. “I don’t know, Ina.” he replied softly. “Perhaps you must remember something else about who you are. That is what I did, I remembered…”  _ What had he first remembered? What was the memory that had first driven a wedge between his mind, and Jenova’s? _

Lurching car, gravel roads. Rain beating down on the window of a militarized van.

_ I’m sorry. I didn’t pack anything for motion sickness. _

Infantryman. Blonde hair, soft, delicate features… a slight flush on the bridge of his nose as Sephiroth spoke to him, perhaps caused by nausea, perhaps by…  _ Cloud. _

_ His first memory of Cloud. Or was it Cloud’s first memory of him?  _

_ I’m sorry.  _ He meant it. He could tell the man felt ridiculous, embarrassed, but Sephiroth thought about the nausea he suffered during Hojo’s investigations. He did not feel ridicule, he felt compassion. He wanted to help.

“I remembered once, I had been kind to… someone. I remembered I had felt…remorse. Sorry for something I had done,” he stiffly elaborated. “Or had failed to do.”

Ina frowned. She put down the wooden sword.

“The moogle I gave you,” Sephiroth remembered, his frown exacerbated in his concentration. “The stuffed toy, you held it to sleep. Did the softness comfort you?”

She nodded. 

“Then you reach for softness, Ina. You are not only killing.”

A tear crossed Ina’s eye. She frowned. 

“Will you tell Ms. Folia? Tell her I keep the moogle?”

He nodded and shook his hand. The fly jerked, sped away, still alive. Sephiroth let it flee and stood to leave. 

“I’ll go and tell her now.”

“Wait.” The urgency reflected in his younger eyes, in Ina’s eyes, pierced him; urgency of a child forced to contend with the soul of a killer, pulsing in that eerie mako glow. He recognized it in her, as in himself. The shadow over his eyes deepened. “I need both,” Ina told him. “I need the moogle but you can’t take my sword.” He stifled the urge to reply that the sword was his, turned to leave, but she screamed at his moving back. “Please. I need it. I need you to teach me how to use it. I’ll learn discipline, I promise. I’ll learn empathy. I’ll do anything.  _ Please _ .”

Sephiroth looked at her in shock, startled by the urgency of her need. Something warm poured in his chest, a crack that made him want to run, a crack that felt something like that moment on the transport carrier, with Cloud. But this,  _ this _ was stronger. More personal. 

“Please,” Ina continued. She looked at him with piercing sincerity.  _ This was not a lie _ . “Please help me make them stop. I can’t… survive… if I let them tell me who I am. If they use me again. Please. If I don’t know how to stop them, I’ll die.”

Sephiroth pressed his lips together, his eyes hardened in resolve.

“Very well.”

———————

He liked Folia. The others, he presumed, had entered a tacit agreement not to tell her who he was; as a result, she knew him as neither a hero nor a villain. Tifa introduced him as “Aesis’... friend” and at Folia’s unremarkable reaction Sephiroth felt more free to step from the shadow of his past. She stumbled over her initial pronunciation of his name, she wondered if Ina was his son. He stared at her.

“Ina’s chosen that body, but she identifies as a girl,” Tifa replied for him, without missing a beat. “And no, she just… She just looks like him.”

“Oh,” Folia replied, apparently nonplussed. “She must think the world of you,” she added softly. He attempted to smile in response but feared the gesture read more as discomfort, a wince. Her own response was more awkward than he’d anticipated; as she spoke, Sephiroth began to see a bookishness in Folia that made him feel at ease.  _ Perhaps,  _ he thought,  _ before, they might have had that in common. Perhaps they did now. _

Folia arrived late the night before. She shook off a drape of black fabric he recognized as a refashioned Wutian army poncho and snapped off a force band loaded with materia, leaving only the metal design synchronizing her magic, delicate yet bold, to speak to her personality. Sephiroth suspected immediately that she was not as subdued as she appeared; he learned later that on the onset of revolution, furious at Shinra’s massacre of civilians in Sector 7 and the suffering it wrought to the children in her care, Folia lended her talents as an aspiring dancer to the war effort. Now a warrior, a specialist in subterfuge and a fledgling talent in hand-to-hand combat, Folia kept her role in the violence minimal, choosing instead to tend to the children left in its wake and orchestrate their extrication from behind enemy lines. She had initiated Wutai’s efforts to compensate the orphans of its war, and founded an orphanage called Leaf House II in Wutai City. 

Sephiroth stood quietly, studying her, choosing once more to anchor himself to a corner of the far wall. It wasn’t clear if Folia was there to help them infiltrate Midgar, or there to take Ina to safety; as she spoke to him, his thoughts drifted. 

The night she arrived he’d left their group to find Aesis at her vanity, wrapped in a translucent veil of linen gaze. A towel. Venetian blonde curls spilled down her bare back, a curtain of ginger tousselled in her fingers as she stroked oil into their lengths. He smelled cedar, yuzu, a blend of herbs he couldn’t name. Sephiroth was vaguely aware, as he walked to her, that the energy stirring in him would have been inaccessible to him  _ before _ , the depth of sensuality would have been untenable. In madness, it overwhelmed him completely, but now, it flowed. Heat of his blood, his breath, his desire. A cracked and scarred joy. That energy freed him to close the distance between them. It freed him to speak.

“A sensual world you create,” he whispered, pushing the hair away to expose her neck, his fingers brushing a fold of gauze. “Shaped of scents, of textures.” She squeezed his hand. “To keep me here,” Aesis whispered in return, pulling his arms around her, letting her head fall back against his chest. “ _ Here. _ ” A faint smile crossed his eyes, barely visible on his lips. “From Wutai? These herbs?” “Mm,” she nodded. “It’s shiso leaf, blended in a base of… some wood. It reminds me of the moss forests, dew in the dawn light.”

“I remember,” his smile grew sad, bittersweet in his memories. Genesis’ profile, a shadow backlit again the gold of the rising sun. “Genesis, Angeal... we liked to escape to those forests. Invent competitions, games.”

“Games,” she smiled. “You were so young. It’s easy to forget,” she whispered. “There is a… timelessness to you, Sephiroth, it feels as if you’ve always carried such an ancient soul.”

“Yes,” he whispered. “Ancient, but far too young. Hostage to the contradiction.”

Her cheek pressed against his bicep, he watched the line of her lips move through heavy eyes.

“You’re beautiful.” 

“Are you alright?”

Sephiroth blinked. Folia. She was speaking to him, but something had sent him deflecting from the conversation, withdrawing into his memory. His fantasy. “I asked if Aesis is back yet,” Folia repeated, frowning slightly. 

_ Oh.  _

He shook his head.

“Ina is too dangerous to take back to Leaf House,” Folia said finally. “She’s suicidal, homicidal, powerful in ways we don’t yet understand. We can’t contain her in Wutai. She’s attached to you,” Folia nodded at Sephiroth. “There’s an argument to be made that we keep you two together, if that’s something you want.”

“Bring a child on a mission?” Sephiroth gritted his teeth, feeling the sting of anger. He pushed it away. “I’ve… I’ve already promised to help her. Train her to fight with,” he laughed without humor. “Fight with dreams and honor. Good Gods. I… may not be the best man for that job.”

“She’s been forced to fight without them. To kill without them,” Folia replied, deep in thought. “I do not raise children to fight, Sephiroth, but nothing normal seems relevant to Ina’s case.” 

“The moogle is relevant,” he whispered, shocked at the defensiveness set in his voice. “She’s asked me to ensure you let her keep it.”

Folia was taken off guard, as if the possibility that Ina could hurt normally enough to respond to the comfort of a stuffed animal shocked her. Sephiroth frowned, wounded at her empathic break with the child. The prospect of helping Ina felt impossible, like wading in a sea of the unknown and the insurmountable with no end in sight. Yet he had empathy for her, he noticed, when that empathy seemed to fail in others. He felt a weight of responsibility then, a realization that his presence was important to Ina’s care.

“Of course,” Folia whispered. 

“Folia,” Vincent spoke. “Forgive me for stating the obvious, but wouldn’t taking Ina with us mean that we would be bring her to Midgar? Directly into a dark op?”

Sephiroth looked at him.

“She is not a child soldier,” Vincent continued. “Your promise to her notwithstanding, Sephiroth, neither of you should have known violence at this age. Her safety is paramount.”

“Agree,” ’Folia replied with tension in her voice. “It’s unclear to me that practically, she would be safer in Wutai than in Midgar. In Wutai, I can offer her things children should have, relationships children should know, and my concern is that she will destroy them, that she will destroy herself. Violently.”

“The war is already in her,” Sephiroth agreed. Vincent looked up. “She is… like a child soldier in some ways, she has no choice in that. She feels safest in fighting. She is murderous, she has never known human connection to mean anything else but a fight to the death. She fears me terribly, but does seem to extract some... fraught... sort of comfort from my presence. She thinks I can help her. I do… want… to stay with her,” he realized it as he spoke, “but I will not take her into battle, I will not bring her into Shinra‘s headquarters. I cannot betray her in that way.” 

“If she is that dangerous,” Folia said firmly, “she cannot go to Leaf House.”

“Then there no place for her on this planet?” Madam M interjected drily, leaning into her air of perpetual boredom. “A shame Corneo should succeed in severing her from all of human society. Perhaps you can leave her in the forest, then. She can kill or be killed among like beasts.”

Sephiroth tensed his jaw; he had not seen the way she reacted with ancient and personal recognition to his words, the way she recognized her story in Ina’s; he had missed the pull of her lips as they dodged an involuntary cry. “Will you give Corneo the power to make her a monster?” She asked the group, successfully setting everyone’s focus on an alternative. Madam M’s now expressionless face curled in a smirk, and it was only then that he realized, in her own way, she was coming to Ina’s defense. 

“Perhaps…” Tifa‘s forehead furrowed in thought. “The slums are operational, right? Under martial law?”

Madam M nodded.

“Maybe we’ve been thinking about this wrong. What if, instead of all infiltrating Shinra HQ, we scatter? Some of us could set up a base in the slums, like AVALANCHE used to have, and keep Ina there. Some of us could infiltrate HQ. We’ll have eyes inside and outside Shinra’s establishment, we’ll have a relatively safe place, with community that can contain her. It’s still dangerous, but she’s pretty stable with us and I don’t think it’ll be much more dangerous than it was for Marlene.”

“Mm,” Folia nodded. “The best of terrible options.”

Madam M shifted as her phone dinged. 

“Ivar’s on his way,” she said slowly. “Finally, a man who doesn’t care about rehabilitating orphans and cuts right to the sex— Mm.” She answered it. “Hello, darling.”

Tifa rolled her eyes.

———————

Ivan seemed nice enough.

He was tall, attractive. Ashen blonde hair and twinkling blue eyes that sparked up when he looked at Madam M.  _ Perhaps the man was in love,  _ Sephiroth imagined. Cloud’s voice rose up in his mind to hiss some ire, but he silenced it.  _ Not now.  _ Still, something uneasy touched his stomach when he watched Ivan’s eyes. An edge to his expression that felt too sharp for love.

Sephiroth smirked.

_ What did he know of love? _

Ivan was speaking. 

They were in danger, he explained. Corneo’s men were in their way to kidnap Madam M and her employees, disappearing them as condemned ghosts into the machine of Corneo’s ring. 

They would be there within minutes.

He had come to get Madam M out, and urged the others to stay, to fight them off when they got to the inn.

Sephiroth moved to accompany Madam M regardless, but Ivan reached to stop him. His hand rested for a fraction of a second against the leather of the ex-General’s coat; his expression hardened and Ivan hastily yanked his hand away.

“Hey man,” he breathed, flashing a boyish grin with charismatic hooks and pearlescent shine. “I’ll protect her, you know? We cool?”

Sephiroth stared, silent, withholding any indication that he and Ivan were cool.

“They’re coming here,” Ivan repeated. “You’re the first line of defense, we need you here. We’ll be fine to get to safety together.”

Ivan insisted that they had no need of his protection, but it wasn’t until Madam M reiterated his sentiment, promising to call the others if their circumstances changed, that Sephiroth acquiesced and stepped back to let them leave.

On his way out the door, Ivan drapes his blazer across Madam M’s shoulders, an act of chivalry that exposed his muscular arm and the flash of his expensive gold watch. Sephiroth’s eyes narrowed; he caught a passing glance of the man’s tattoo, an outline of an animal, the claws and fangs of an apex predator, tracing the edge of his bicep.

Sephiroth frowned.

_ A tattoo of a dragon. _

He watched the door close behind Ivan’s broad form and ash blonde hair, and walked back inside the inn. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dun dun. Thank you for reading and I hope you liked it!  
> As always, your feedback, reactions, are welcome.  
> I’m not ready to be on a regular schedule again, but I’m still writing. More soon-ish.


End file.
